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Summer 2015
Home > News > Current Newsletter

Meet the Lab

President's Message
This is the first in what hopes to be a regular addition to the APS newsletter. While it is always

From the Editor

nice to highlight a particular APS member, we all know that it is often the graduate students,
lab managers, and postdoctoral fellows in the trenches that push the science along. In the
spirit of recognizing those efforts I am proud to present to you the following:

Meet the Lab

Meet the DIeting, Stress and Health (DiSH) Lab

Lab Director: A. Janet Tomiyama, Ph.D.

Getting to Know
You...Cohen

APS: Who are you and what do you study in the DiSH lab?
AJT: I received my B.A. in Psychology from Cornell University,

Tribute to George K.
Degnon, CAE

my Ph.D. in Social Psychology, minoring in Health and

Quantitative Psych, from UCLA, and was a Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at
UCSF/Berkeley. I am now Assistant Professor in the

Special Issue of
Psychosomatic
Medicine
Scenes from 2015 APS
Annual Meeting
Journal Highlights

Department of Psychology at UCLA in the Health Psychology

area.
I began my career studying low-calorie dieting, and how it never
seemed to lead to long-term weight loss. Ive found that dieting
is stressful and engages the HPA axis, which in turn could trigger obesogenic processes like
cortisol-induced fat deposition and stress eating. Given that dieting doesnt seem to work (and
no one likes doing it), my next question was why people would torture themselves by going on
diets. The answer, I suspect, is weight stigma, which is really pervasive and doesnt enjoy the
same legal protections like we see with race, gender, and sexual orientation. In the past

APS Mid-Year Meeting

Newsletter PDF

couple years Ive been testing a model where weight stigma induces stress, which induces
cortisol and eating, in turn increasing weight - a vicious cycle model of weight stigma.
APS: How is the lab structured?
AJT: I tend to select graduate students who fit three criteria: (1) Tons of research experience,
specifically experience in the most tedious and annoying parts of research. I want students
who understand the daily grind of research and somehow still want to make a career of it. This
means all my graduate students have had at least a year of post-bac research experience. (2)
Enjoy math and statistics. So much of what we do depends on a deep knowledge of statistics,
and Ive found stats nerds tend to be stellar methodologists as well. (2) Overflowing with
testable research ideas - this is the fuel that sustains an academics career, and my most
important criterion. Then, I try to support and help them develop their own program of
research. Although this means there will likely never be a Janet clone, I find it incredibly

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invigorating to constantly stretch my research boundaries. And my students are so stellar that
this process makes me a better academic.
APS: Are there any unique aspects of this lab?
AJT: We meet as a group once a week, usually to workshop a draft of a paper/grant, or to
struggle through a new study design. My lab is built so that we have standing-up meetings
(sitting is the new smoking! is a refrain heard often around the lab), which is healthy. But,
you will always find M&Ms, potato chips, and ice cream left over from our experiments, which
is not so healthy. Our lab dog, Cashew, runs around during lab meetings licking lotion off of
everyones legs, which is not healthy for her, but good social support for everyone in our lab,
which hopefully tips everything back towards healthiness.
APS: Now lets meet some members of the DiSH Lab
Jenna Cummings (Graduate Student):
JC: I earned my BA in Psychology at the University of South
Florida. Currently, I am a third year doctoral student in the health
psychology program at UCLA, and in 2014 received my M.A. in
Psychology as part of the program. I was also recently awarded a
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. My
primary focus is at the biopsychosocial intersection of
reinforcement pathways to two critical health behaviors: drinking
alcohol and eating food. My most current study examines how
sharing in unhealthy eating and drinking (versus healthy)
influences friendships. Learn more at:
jennarcummings.weebly.com. My favorite talk at APS was the
2015 plenary address by John Cryan. I was in awe about his studies showcasing the role of
microbiota in the central nervous system.
Laura Finch (Graduate Student):
LF: I am a fourth year doctoral student in UCLA's Health
Psychology program. I earned my B.S. in Human Development at
Cornell University with concentrations in Social and Personality
Development as well as Nutrition and Health, and went on to earn
my M.A. in Psychology at UCLA. Im currently supported by a
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. My
most recent work focuses on comfort eating, including both the
physiological underpinnings driving this behavior and the
psychological benefits it reaps via stress reduction. My favorite
talk at APS was a 2014 symposium titled, "What's the vagus got to
do with it? Prospective studies of heart rate variability."
Researchers and health professionals collect so many biological
markers of health these days, and I think it's important for us to understand how each
measurement relates to actual behavior and health outcomes. At this symposium, I learned
from Julian Thayer and colleagues how heart rate variability can predict sleep quality,
inflammation, and other heart activities.

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Jolene Nguyen-Cuu (Postbaccalaureate Lab Manager):

JNC: I recently earned my BS in Psychobiology at UCLA and
will be applying to medical school in the spring. I have been
the manager of the DiSH Lab for over a year now and am
excited to continue my contributions during my gap years.
Being a huge foodie and a skeptic of fad diets, I was initially
interested in the DiSH Lab because I wanted scientific
evidence behind dieting. I have also always believed that
health is a state of physical, mental, and social well-being, so I
am continually excited by how our research goes beyond the
physiological implications of dieting. Many people mistakenly
look at weight as a measure of health and tend to overlook the psychological and social
consequences of dieting and weight stigma. With this, I love how our research is not only
extremely important, but also immediately applicable. Because of how relevant our research
is, I actually often find myself discussing our findings with friends and family.
Erin Standen (Undergraduate Lab Manager):

ES: Im a fourth-year undergraduate student at UCLA studying

Psychobiology and Spanish. Ive been interested in food,
nutrition, and weight since I was young, but was first introduced
to the field of health psychology when I took Dr. Tomiyamas Fiat
Lux seminar on the psychology of eating. Later that year, I was
actually a participant in one of the DiSH Labs studies
(Himmelstein et al., 2015), and I found it so intriguing that I was
determined to get involved in the labs research! In my past two
years as an RA, I've become very familiar with the labs areas of
research, and Ive grown more and more interested in the
psychological and biological implications of eating, dieting, and
weight stigma. Im delighted to now be a manager of the lab, and
cant wait to get to work on my senior honors thesis (also in the DiSH lab, on weight stigma) in
the Fall!
Cashew (lab dog):

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C: woof.
Want to know more about the DiSH Lab? Check out the website: www.dishlab.org

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