NCCIH Welcomes Three New Members to Advisory Council

The National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) welcomes three new members—with expertise in acupuncture, natural products, and mind and body approaches—to its National Advisory Council for Complementary and Integrative Health (NACCIH). The council serves as the principal advisory body to NCCIH, the lead federal agency for research on complementary and integrative health.

The NACCIH—composed of physicians, scientists, complementary health practitioners, and members of the public—represents a broad range of science and practice. Members serve a four-year term and meet three times per year to provide second-level peer review, as well as other advice and recommendations on the prioritization of complementary and integrative health research.

“We are delighted to welcome these accomplished scientists and researchers to the council, which I and other NCCIH staff depend upon for scientific, research, and administrative input,” said David Shurtleff, Ph.D., NCCIH Acting Director. “Two of the new members bring expertise as clinical health care providers as well.”

The new members are:

Belinda J. Anderson, Ph.D., L.Ac., is the academic dean and research director at Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, New York, New York, and adjunct clinical associate professor in the Department of Family and Social Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York. She has also held research positions at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and at the New England School of Acupuncture (NESA) in collaboration with Harvard Medical School. Dr. Anderson cochairs the Research Working Group of the Academic Collaborative for Integrative Health, is an editor for several medical journals in complementary and integrative health, and is widely published. She maintains a private practice in acupuncture at New York University Langone Health Fertility Center. Funders of her research include NCCIH, the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), and the Health Resources and Services Administration. Dr. Anderson holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Sydney (Australia) and a master’s degree in acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine from NESA, part of Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.

John B. MacMillan, Ph.D., is professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on isolating and characterizing natural products from marine-derived bacteria with promising biological activity, including for their roles in the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases, and on developing methods to study their mechanisms of action. Dr. MacMillan is coprincipal investigator of the Center for High-throughput Functional Annotation of Natural Products, a research center jointly funded by NCCIH and the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements that is pursuing innovative strategies to study the biological effects of these products. One major aspect is the development of cell-based screening approaches to uncover bioactive molecules of interest and their molecular targets. Dr. MacMillan received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Davis, and his postdoctoral training at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. He received the 2016 Young Investigator Award from the journal Marine Drugs and the 2015 Matt Suffness Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Pharmacognosy.

Gloria Y. Yeh, M.D., M.P.H., is associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her research program is based in the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), where she is director of mind and body research and the Harvard Medical School Research Fellowship in Integrative Medicine. Dr. Yeh’s major research activities involve the investigation of efficacy and mechanisms of mind and body approaches (such as tai chi, yoga, and meditation) for chronic, complex illnesses, particularly cardiopulmonary conditions. The physiological, psychosocial, and behavioral outcomes she has examined include exercise capacity, cardiorespiratory efficiency, physical activity, quality of life, mood, and self-efficacy. Dr. Yeh has been principal investigator or coinvestigator on a number of NCCIH-funded studies investigating mind-body exercise, tai chi, and meditative breathing for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In addition, she is a physician at Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians and the Cheng-Tsui Integrated Health Center, both at BIDMC. Dr. Yeh received her Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and completed her residency at Boston Medical Center.