Contact
Primary Investigator/Lab Contact
Firdaus S. Dhabhar, Ph.D.
Professor, Departments of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and Microbiology & Immunology, Member Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami
Mailing Address
Firdaus Dhabhar Lab
c/o Department of Psychiatry
Soffer Clinical Research Building
1120 NW 14th Street
Miami, FL 33136
Research Focus
Our goal is to discover mechanisms through which an individual’s psychology and biology — the whole person — can be brought into and maintained in a state that maximizes health and healing. Understanding these mechanisms allows us to find ways for physicians to harness a person’s natural healing capacity that can be used along with medical interventions.
We discovered that the short-term stress response is an important enhancer of immune function. Although stress has a bad reputation, the fight-or-flight stress response is nature’s fundamental survival system that prepares the body to deal with a threat or challenge. Therefore, we are working on harnessing short-term stress physiology to enhance immuno-protection in the context of vaccination, wound healing, and cancer treatment.
We also investigate the harmful, dysregulatory effects of chronic stress and related disorders — such as anxiety and depression — and resilience mechanisms, including psychosocial and biological factors that mediate resistance to harmful stress effects. We examine stress effects on immune cell trafficking, innate/adaptive immunity, and cytokine gene/protein expression in the context of skin immunity, vaccination, surgery, and cancer. By understanding these mechanisms, we hope to develop behavioral and pharmacologic interventions that use a person’s psycho-physiology to enhance selectively (during vaccination, surgery, infection, or cancer) or suppress (during inflammatory and autoimmune disease, and some psychiatric disorders) the immune response, depending on a person’s clinical needs.
In keeping with his research focus, Dr. Dhabhar teaches modules on stress, psychoneuroimmunology and mind-body medicine for undergraduate, graduate, and medical students and residents. He’s the director of the Pathway in Mind-Body Medicine that’s part of the NextGen MD Curriculum at the Miller School of Medicine.