Dr. Nikko Da Paz holds a BA from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Health Psychology from the University of California, Merced. Dr. Da Paz’s research investigates the science of stress, which includes stress effects on mental health and physiology, and psychological resources that protect from stress (stress resilience). She has conducted studies of interventions to promote resilience to stress in parental caregivers.

Dr. Melissa Hagan  is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of Science & Engineering at San Francisco State University and an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Psychiatry Department at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Hagan earned an MPH in Epidemiology from Boston University School of Public Health and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Arizona State University. She completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco Child Trauma Research Program in the Department of Psychiatry.

Kim Coleman-Phox is the project director of Dr. Epel's U01 grant, Novel Interventions to Reduce Non-homeostatic Eating, which includes the Maternal Adiposity, Metabolism and Stress (MAMAS) and Stress, Eating, and Hormones (SHE) Studies. She completed her MPH in Maternal Child Health at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include pregnancy, birth outcomes, and health disparities.

Dr. Carter Lebares is a gastrointestinal and bariatric surgeon at UCSF Medical Center who specializes treating gastrointestinal disease, particularly of the esophagus and stomach, using minimally invasive surgery, robotics and surgical endoscopy. This includes treatments for reflux disease, hiatal hernia, obesity, early esophageal or gastric cancer, esophageal motility disorders hernias, gallbladder disease and some biliary disease.