About
Elissa Epel, Ph.D, is an international expert on stress, well-being, and optimal aging and a best-selling author. She is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, at the University of California, San Francisco, where she is a Well Being Advisor, and co-directs the Aging Metabolism Emotions Center, the CCHE UC-wide Eco Resilience Initiative, and the Health Psychology postdoctoral program. She studies the environmental, social, psychological, and behavioral factors that impact cellular aging (such as telomeres, inflammation, and mitochondria), eating and metabolism, and healthspan, as well as biobehavioral interventions to slow rate of aging. She is team leading new movements to bring social contemplative resilience skills to climate and human rights leaders, and to university students. She has been co-leading the NIH Stress Network for over a decade, to support the field of stress and aging research
She studies how self-care practices such as meditation and positive stress can promote psychological and physiological thriving and is interested in development, dissemination, and implementation of large-scale interventions, for communal well-being and health equity in living with polycrisis stress. The Big Joy Project, a crowd sourced intervention has already enrolled over 100,000 people globally and is still open to the public. Epel co-leads the National Growth and Health Study, a longitudinal study following a girls to adulthood, and their offspring, to understand lifecourse social exposome and biological aging. She co-wrote the New York Times best-seller “The Telomere Effect: A revolutionary approach to living younger, longer” with Nobel Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn (translated into 30 languages) and the “Stress Prescription,” an independent bookstore best seller. She enjoys leading contemplative science-based meditation retreats.
Epel is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, American Academy for Advancement of Science (AAAS), and served as President of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, Vice Chair of Psychiatry, and co-chair of the Mind & Life Institute Steering Council. She has served as a consultant to NIH, CDC, Facebook, Apple, United Health, and UC campus-wide initiatives on stress and health. Since 2019, she was named a highly cited researcher, among the top 1% of researchers globally. Epel’s research has been featured in venues such as TEDMED, Wisdom 2.0, NBC’s Today Show, CBS’s Morning Show, 60 minutes, National Public Radio, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and science documentaries.
