Maria Bleil received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in the joint Clinical Psychology and Biological/Health Psychology programs. She completed her clinical internship in the department of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her dissertation research examined the common and unique pathways by which individual differences in negative affective dispositions are related to variation in autonomic control of heart rate as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. She is interested in developing and testing models of disease risk that explain why psychological and biological risk factors for disease tend to co-occur. She is also interested in the role of the environment in modulating the relationship between psychological diatheses for disease and disease development itself.