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Eric Garland, PhD is Endowed Professor at the Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion, Professor of Psychiatry at University of California San Diego, Director of UCSD ONEMIND (Optimized Neuroscience-Enhanced Mindfulness Intervention Development), and faculty in the UCSD Center for Addiction Science and Treatment. The goal of his research agenda is to translate findings from affective neuroscience into the development of interventions that effectively target pathogenic mechanisms underpinning addiction, emotion dysregulation, and chronic pain. In that regard, Dr. Garland is the developer of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE), a novel evidence-based therapy that integrates training in mindfulness, reappraisal, and savoring skills to ameliorate addictive behavior, psychiatric conditions, and physical pain. His mechanistic research program is focused on attention, cue-reactivity, appraisal, and reward processing in the context of substance use disorders. As PI or Co-Investigator on $90+ million in federally-funded research grants, Dr. Garland developed methodological expertise in the design and implementation of clinical trials of integrative behavioral interventions for addiction and chronic pain conditions, as well as in advanced statistical analyses of clinical outcomes, ecological momentary assessments (EMA), and neurophysiological mediators and moderators.

Through these research and clinical experiences, Dr. Garland has implemented multiple randomized controlled trials of mindfulness and other integrative interventions (e.g., psychedelics, neurofeedback), established cognitive neuroscience methods to assess mechanisms of behavior change, published treatment manuals, and developed therapist training and treatment fidelity monitoring procedures. He has published more than 270 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts to date, many in high impact journals including JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Psychiatry, Science Advances, American Journal of Psychiatry, Neuropsychopharmacology, Journal of Clinical Oncology, and Biological Psychiatry.

In 2019, in recognition of his impact on the field, Dr. Garland was appointed by NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins to the NIH HEAL Multi-Disciplinary Working Group comprised of national experts on pain and addiction research to help guide the nation’s $2+ billion HEAL initiative to use science to halt the opioid crisis. He is also a licensed psychotherapist and Distinguished Fellow of the National Academies of Practice, with more than 20 years of clinical experience providing mindfulness and cognitive-behavioral therapies. In bibliometric analyses of mindfulness research (Baminiwatta et al., 2021; Ferreira & Demarzo, 2023), Dr. Garland was found to be the most prolific author of mindfulness research in the world.