By Nicholas Roznovsky
Lisa and John Pritzker Distinguished Professor of Developmental and Behavioral Health W. Thomas Boyce, MD, has been selected by the Simms/Mann Institute as one of its 2018 recipients of the Whole Child Award. The honor recognizes extraordinary leaders in the field of care for children ages 0-3 who incorporate new and integrative approaches in education and health.
Boyce, who is also co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research's Child and Brain Development Program and a member of the National Academy of Medicine, will receive the award at the 2018 Simms Mann Institute Think Tank on May 2 in Los Angeles.
Boyce's research addresses the interplay among neurobiological and psychosocial processes leading to socially partitioned differences in childhood health and disease. His work has demonstrated how psychological stress and neurobiological reactivity to aversive social contexts operate conjointly to produce disorders of both physical and mental health in childhood populations.
He spent 20 years at UC Berkeley as a professor of epidemiology and child development, associate dean for academic affairs and research at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and professor of pediatrics at UCSF before heading to the University of British Columbia, where he was the Sunny Hill Health Centre/BC Leadership Chair in Child Development. In 2013, Boyce returned to UCSF and now serves as professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Psychiatry and head of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics. He has also served as a member of Harvard University’s National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, UC Berkeley’s Institute of Human Development, and was a founding co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars Program at UC Berkeley and UCSF.
Boyce will become the second UCSF faculty member to receive the prestigious award. UCSF Psychiatry's Alicia Liberman, PhD, was presented with the honor in 2017.
About UCSF Psychiatry
The UCSF Department of Psychiatry and the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute are among the nation's foremost resources in the fields of child, adolescent, adult, and geriatric mental health. Together they constitute one of the largest departments in the UCSF School of Medicine and the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, with a mission focused on research (basic, translational, clinical), teaching, patient care and public service.
UCSF Psychiatry conducts its clinical, educational and research efforts at a variety of locations in Northern California, including UCSF campuses at Parnassus Heights, Mission Bay and Laurel Heights, UCSF Medical Center, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, the San Francisco VA Health Care System and UCSF Fresno.
About the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences
The UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, established by the extraordinary generosity of Joan and Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill, brings together world-class researchers with top-ranked physicians to solve some of the most complex challenges in the human brain.
The UCSF Weill Institute leverages UCSF’s unrivaled bench-to-bedside excellence in the neurosciences. It unites three UCSF departments—Neurology, Psychiatry, and Neurological Surgery—that are highly esteemed for both patient care and research, as well as the Neuroscience Graduate Program, a cross-disciplinary alliance of nearly 100 UCSF faculty members from 15 basic-science departments, as well as the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, a multidisciplinary research center focused on finding effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders.
About UCSF
UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational and population sciences; and a preeminent biomedical research enterprise. It also includes UCSF Health, which comprises top-ranked hospitals – UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland – and other partner and affiliated hospitals and healthcare providers throughout the Bay Area.
