Speaker Profile
Joel E. Dimsdale

Joel E. Dimsdale MD, MA

Psychiatry, Neurology
La Jolla, California, United States of America

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Joel Dimsdale, MD, is a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor in the department of psychiatry. He was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and obtained his BA degree in biology from Carleton College. He then attended Stanford University, where he received both a MA degree in Sociology and an MD degree. He obtained his psychiatric training at Massachusetts General Hospital and then completed a fellowship in psychobiology at the New England Regional Primate Center. He was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School from 1976 until 1985 when he moved to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

His clinical subspecialty is consultation psychiatry. He is an active investigator, a former career awardee of the American Heart Association, and is past president of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the American Psychosomatic Society, and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. He has served on numerous editorial boards in psychiatry, psychology, anthropology, medicine, and pharmacology and is Section Editor of UpToDate. He is editor-in-chief emeritus of Psychosomatic Medicine and is a previous guest editor of Circulation, Drug Therapy, Psychiatric Clinics of North America, J Psychosomatic Research, and International Journal of Hypertension. He has been a consultant to the President’s Commission on Mental Health, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and NASA and is a long-time reviewer for NIH. Dr. Dimsdale is the former Chair of the UCSD Academic Senate and is a recipient of the Oliver Johnson Award for distinguished leadership. Dr. Dimsdale’s major research interests center on stress physiology and sleep; cultural factors in illness; quality of life; and psychological reverberations of the Holocaust.