Dr. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser stands as a preeminent leader in psychoneuroimmunology with her distinguished career at The Ohio State University. She holds the prestigious title of Distinguished University Professor, an honor awarded to only approximately fifty faculty members since 1985, and serves as Director of the Ohio State Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research. Dr. Kiecolt-Glaser also holds the S. Robert Davis Chair of Medicine while maintaining professorial appointments in Psychiatry, Psychology, and Public Health. Her academic foundation was established with a BA in Psychology and minor in Biological Sciences from the University of Oklahoma in 1972, followed by a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Miami in 1976, creating the interdisciplinary framework for her groundbreaking work.
Dr. Kiecolt-Glaser has pioneered transformative research demonstrating how psychological stress profoundly impacts biological processes, particularly immune function, wound healing, and inflammation. Her extensive body of work, comprising over 250 publications often co-authored with her late husband virologist Ronald Glaser, established fundamental connections between marital conflict, caregiving stress, and impaired physiological responses. Her research has been consistently supported by the National Institutes of Health, including a prestigious MERIT award, and has been featured prominently in major news outlets such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. With an impressive ISI h-index of 72 and Google Scholar h-index of 101, her scientific influence extends across multiple disciplines including psychology, immunology, and medicine.
As a past President of the Division of Health Psychology and an elected member of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Kiecolt-Glaser has significantly shaped her field through leadership and mentorship. She has served on the editorial boards of numerous prestigious journals including Brain, Behavior and Immunity, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, and Psychosomatic Medicine, guiding scientific discourse in biobehavioral medicine. Her contributions have been recognized with multiple honors including the Patricia A. Barchas Award from the American Psychosomatic Society and the Norman Cousins Award from the Psychoneuroimmunology Research Society. Currently, Dr. Kiecolt-Glaser continues to advance understanding of how stress and depression alter metabolic processes and inflammation, with her work having profound implications for improving health outcomes across diverse populations.
