BBH Colloquium Schedule

All events take place from 4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. in 110 Henderson Building

January 26, 2026

Lisa Christian, PhD, Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research

Talk Title: Sexual Minority Health: Linking Chronic Stress, Inflammation, and Epigenetic Aging

Lisa Christian is a professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Health and a member of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research where she has been a faculty member since 2008. She received her PhD in clinical health psychology from The Ohio State University after completing internship at the University of Florida Health Science Center. Dr. Christian’s research has been funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), and National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR). Her clinical work focuses on cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety, depression, and sleep disorders, particularly in women. In addition to these roles, she serves as the Medical Student Advocate within the College of Medicine, helping to advance a positive learning environment. Outside of work, she enjoys traveling, vegetarian cooking, reading, and spending time with her two children and two Bernedoodles. As part of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, directed by Lisa Christian, PhD, the Stress, Behavioral Immunology, and Health Lab examines how exposures to chronic stress, mood disorders, anxiety, and sleep disturbance interact in a bi-directional manner with the immune and neuroendocrine system to affect physical and mental health. Our studies use psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) research approaches to examine how stress “gets under the skin” among individuals caregiving for a spouse with dementia, people coping with cancer, pregnant women, as well as people exposed to chronic stress or discrimination related to race/ethnicity, sexual minority status, or financial strain. An ultimate goal of these studies is to address health disparities and inform behavioral interventions by identifying key pathways by which stress affects health.

February 2, 2026

Daniel Moriarity, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Penn Arts & Sciences, University of Pennsylvania

Talk Title: Toward a Multi-Faceted Framework of " Precision" in Health Research: Immunopsychiatry as a Use Case

Dr. Daniel P. Moriarity directs the The Precision Psychopathology + Dynamic Immunopsychiatry (PPDI) Lab at UPenn. This lab conducts research focused on the dynamic interplay between stress, immunology, and affective psychopathology (depression, anxiety and hypo/mania). Using these research areas as a canvas, the broader mission of this lab is to identify facets of "precision" that are fundamental to making precision medicine the new status quo for mental health research and clinical practice. For example, (1) refining symptom-level clinical phenotypes associated with immunology, (2) advancing standards for biological data collection and modeling via physiometric research, and (3) integrating plausible biological mechanisms into robustly supported psychosocial frameworks of psychopathology risk, resilience, and treatment. This lab uses a breadth of methods (ecologically valid stress paradigms, acute stress tasks, psychological and pharmacological clinical trials) in pursuit of this mission. By conducting work that spans the basic-to-clinical research continuum, we aspire to equally contribute to both raising the methodological bar in biological psychology and informing the development and implementation of treatments.

A complete list of publications can be found at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=zTCuAVcAAAAJ&hl=en

February 23, 2026

Anna Marsland, PhD, Full Professor, The Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh

Talk Title: TBD

Anna Marsland is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. She also serves as Chair of the Biological and Health Psychology Program. She started her career as a Registered Nurse in Oxford, England and became interested in associations of psychological, environmental and behavioral factors with physical health outcomes. This interest led her to pursue a B.Sc. in Psychology at University College London and her PhD in Clinical and Health Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. She completed a post doctoral fellowship at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center and worked for a few years as a Clinical Health Psychologist at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh before joining faculty at Pitt.

Dr. Marsland oversees a large research lab with many ongoing projects examining biopsychosocial factors that relate to physical health outcomes. She has a focused interest in psychoneuroimmunology and the impact of psychological factors (e.g., stress), socioeconomics and health behaviors on immune parameters of relevance for health across the lifespan.