NCCIH Advisory Council Welcomes Five New Members

The National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) welcomes five new members to its National Advisory Council for Complementary and Integrative Health. The council serves as the principal advisory body to NCCIH, the lead federal agency for research on complementary and integrative health.

The highly distinguished NCCIH council—composed of physicians, scientists, complementary health practitioners, and members of the public—represents a broad range of science and practice. Members serve a four year term and meet three times a year to provide second-level peer review, as well as other advice and recommendations on the prioritization of complementary and integrative health research.

“NCCIH is pleased to welcome members whose diverse set of skills and knowledge build upon our areas of research focus including pain, symptom management, quality of life, and basic/mechanistic research,” said Josephine P. Briggs, M.D., NCCIH Director. “Their scientific and clinical expertise and perspectives will enrich the Council’s ability to provide valuable insights as we begin implementation of our 2016 Strategic Plan.”

The new council members are:

Steven Z. George, Ph.D., P.T., is an associate professor in the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Florida, in Gainesville. He is also director of the Doctor of Physical Therapy Program and director of the Brooks-Public Health and Health Professions Research Collaboration. Dr. George’s primary interests involve the use of biopsychosocial models to prevent and treat chronic musculoskeletal pain. He has authored more than 160 peer-reviewed publications and has been recognized with research awards from the American Physical Therapy Association, the American Pain Society, and the International Association for the Study of Pain. Funders of Dr. George’s studies include the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Defense, the American Physical Therapy Association, and the Foundation for Physical Therapy.

Bin He, Ph.D., is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor, the Medtronic-Bakken Endowed Chair, and director of the Institute for Engineering in Medicine and the Center for Neuroengineering at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Dr. He's research interests include neuroengineering, functional biomedical imaging, functional cardiac engineering, and medical devices. He is a recipient of the Academic Career Achievement Award from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, the Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association, and the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, among others. He has received many competing awards from NIH and has published close to 200 articles in peer-reviewed core international journals. He has pioneered the use of mind-body awareness intervention in brain-computer interface research.

Patricia Herman, Ph.D., N.D., is a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation and a faculty member of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, in Santa Monica, California. She is a research methodologist, resource economist, and licensed naturopathic doctor. Dr. Herman’s research focuses on health economics, innovative care models, individuals’ health decisions, and overall quality of life. She has conducted policy and cost-effectiveness analyses on these and other topics for more than 30 years. Dr. Herman’s research funders include NIH, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and the NCMIC Foundation. Among her publications are three books on economic evaluation methods, two systematic reviews of economic evaluations of complementary and integrative medicine, and a commissioned paper on the economics of integrative medicine for the Institute of Medicine’s Summit on Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public.

Cynthia Price, Ph.D., L.M.T., is a research associate professor in the Department of Biobehavioral Nursing and Health Systems at the University of Washington School of Nursing, Seattle. Dr. Price is a licensed massage therapist who holds a Ph.D. in nursing science and an M.A. in counseling psychology. Dr. Price has received several grants from NIH. Her research focuses on the study of Mindful Awareness in Body-oriented Therapy (MABT), a mind-body intervention that teaches interoceptive awareness skills to improve self-care and emotional regulation. MABT has been evaluated in women in recovery from childhood sexual abuse or substance use disorder, women with comorbid chronic pain and post-traumatic stress disorder, and people living with HIV. She is a co-author of two scales, the Scale of Body Connection and the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, to measure interoceptive awareness in mind-body research. Dr. Price directs the Center for Mindful Body Awareness in Seattle, a nonprofit organization providing professional trainings in MABT, with a focus on integrating mindful body awareness into health care services, particularly for underserved populations.

Susmita Kashikar-Zuck, Ph.D., is an endowed research director and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. A clinical psychologist, she directs the Behavioral Pain Management Research Laboratory at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. The laboratory focuses on studies of chronic pain in children and adolescents, the best ways to assess pediatric pain, pain’s impact on physical and psychosocial functioning, coping with pain, developing evidence-based non-pharmacologic treatments for chronic pain, and how to disseminate evidence-based treatments using quality-improvement methods. She also has a strong interest in developing interventions for adolescents with juvenile fibromyalgia and studying its longitudinal outcomes. Dr. Kashikar-Zuck has received numerous competing awards from NIH, served on NIH study sections, and authored numerous publications.