Dr. Elizabeth Hoge is a clinical assistant at the Center for Anxiety
and Traumatic Stress Related Disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital. She studies biological changes that occur in the
body as a result of stress, anxiety and trauma, which may serve as markers for anxiety disorders and may elucidate pathways
that could be targeted for novel pharmacologic therapies. She is also interested in identifying biological markers of resilience
that protect some people from developing post-traumatic stress disorder after a trauma. Dr. Hoge has received awards from the Anxiety Disorders Association of America and the New Clinical Drug Evaluation
Unit of the National Institute of Mental Health related to her work in anxiety disorders. She also received a Harvard Medical
School Dupont Warren Fellowship award to study the effect of treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal
axis. Recently, Dr. Hoge received a five-year NIH grant to measure the effect of mindfulness meditation on anxiety and stress.
She will be incorporating biological markers of stress, such as stress hormones and inflammatory markers, and will measure
how the practice of mindfulness meditation may effect these biomarkers, which may partially explain the beneficial health
effects from meditation.
