Rick Hecht is Research Director of the Osher Center, and Professor of Medicine at UCSF. He received his MD from SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn, and completed Internal Medicine residency at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine Residency Program in Social Medicine. He received training in clinical research methods during a fellowship in Clinical Epidemiology at UCSF. Following fellowship, Dr. Hecht developed a multidisciplinary research program investigating early (primary) HIV infection. He has served as co-director of the UCSF Center for AIDS Research Behavioral and Epidemiology core, a board member of the HIV Medicine Association, and an Associate Editor of “AIDS Clinical Care.”
At the UCSF Osher Center, Dr. Hecht has built a research program that focuses on mind-body interventions, particularly meditation and yoga, using a psychoneuroimmunology approach to studying the effects of these practices on the endocrine, metabolic and immune systems. He is the author of over 200 peer-reviewed articles, and has been the principal investigator of eight grants from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including two Center for Excellence in Research on Complementary and Alternative Medicine grants. He directs the UCSF Training in Research in Integrative Medicine fellowship program, funded by NCCIH.
