Joel Dimsdale

Dr. Dimsdale is the author of >500 publications and is the author of Dark Persuasion: a History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media, Yale University Press (forthcoming August, 2021). He obtained his BA degree in biology from Carleton College and then his MA in sociology and MD degree from Stanford University. He obtained his psychiatric training at Massachusetts General Hospital and then completed a fellowship in psychobiology at the New England Regional Primate Center. He was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School from 1976 until 1985, when he moved to University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Dimsdale is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the department of psychiatry at UCSD. His clinical subspecialty is consultation psychiatry and his research focuses on stress, sleep, and quality of life. He is a former career awardee of the American Heart Association, and is past-president of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the American Psychosomatic Society, and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. He is on numerous editorial boards, including editor-at-large Journal Psychosomatic Research, is editor-in-chief emeritus of Psychosomatic Medicine, and is a previous guest editor of Circulation. He has been a consultant to the President's Commission on Mental Health, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academies of Science, NASA, and NIH. He was a member of the DSM5 taskforce and chaired the workgroup studying somatic symptom disorders.