Psychoneuroimmunology Postdoctoral Fellowship

The UCLA Post-Graduate Training Program in Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) is sponsored by the Cousins Center and the National Institute of Mental Health. The program serves as a major campus facilitator for bridging training in the fields of behavioral science, neuroscience, and immunology and is the sole comprehensive campus training program integrating concerns of basic and clinical immunologists with those of a wide range of neuroscientists and behavioral investigators. 

The goal of the Post-Graduate Training Program is to provide a multi-disciplinary education and training to postdoctoral students from various backgrounds, chosen by virtue of their past records in creative and innovative research. Fellows work on their own projects under the mentorship of selected faculty who have a proven record of PNI research excellence. Fellows also interact with Cousins Center faculty and other fellows through a weekly seminar in psychoneuroimmunology.

Our overall approach is to inform clinical understanding through state-of-the-art behavioral, neurobiological, neuroimmunological and neuroendocrinological techniques. By combining a high level of methodological sophistication about clinically relevant issues and mechanisms with a firm grounding in neuroscience and immunology, we believe that the scientific knowledge base of PNI will be markedly advanced, and that this effort will illuminate the role of psychosocial factors in immune-related diseases and the mechanisms by which such factors transduce experience to biology.

PNI is a scientific field that investigates bi-directional interactions among the neural, endocrine, and immune systems, and biobehavioral mechanisms that underlie the onset and progression of immune-related human disease. Given its broad faculty resources, the program familiarizes trainees with the diversity of information that is necessary for creative problem solving in basic and clinical PNI research, and provides a supportive yet critical research training environment with one-on-one supervision of research fellows.