Emeran Anton Mayer is a Gastroenterologist, Lecturer, Author, Editor, Neuroscientist, Documentary Filmmaker and a Professor in the Departments of Medicine, Physiology and Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles He is a pioneer of medical research into brain gut interactions.
Education
There, he filmed and studied native healers while exploring his suspicion that the interactions between the gut and the brain transcend culture and time. After moving to the United States, he completed his specialty training as a gastroenterologist at University of California, Los Angeles and from then on focused his work on basic, translational, and clinical aspects of brain gut interactions.
Career
Mayer became interested in mind-brain-body interactions in health and chronic disease as a college student at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, which inspired his decision to go to medical school at Ludwig Maximilian University Medical School His interest in documentary filmmaking galvanized this fascination and resulted in his journeys to the Yanoama tribes in the Orinoco region, and the Asmat people in Irian Jaya. Mayer’s research career began at the Institute of Physiology in Munich, with a dissertation on the mechanisms by which the brain affects coronary blood flow in the heart during psychological stress. He has 30 years of experience studying clinical and neurobiological aspects of how the digestive and nervous systems interact in health and disease.
In the United States Mayer found strong support from the United States. government via National Institutes of Health (National Institutes of Health) grants.
Mayer is the Executive Director of the Oppenheimer Family Center for Neurobiology of Stress, and Company-director of the CURE: Digestive Diseases Research Center at University of California, Los Los Angeles As one of the pioneers and leading researchers in the role of mind-brain-body interactions in health and chronic disease, his scientific contributions to United States. national and international communities in the broad area of basic and translational enteric neurobiology with wide-ranging applications in clinical GI diseases and disorders is unparalleled. He has a longstanding interest in ancient healing traditions and affords them a level of respect rarely found in Western Medicine.
More recently he has focused on several new areas of brain gut interactions, including the role of food addiction in obesity, the role of the brain in inflammatory bowel disorders such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, and on the role of the gut microbiota in influencing brain structure and function, as he explained on National Public Radio. Most recently, Doctor Mayer spoke at University of California, Los Angeles TEDx on The Mysterious Origins of Gut Feelings.
Mayer lives in Los Angeles, California.