Dr. Whooley received her B.A. from Yale University and M.D. from Boston University School of Medicine before completing her residency and chief residency in Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Whooley is currently Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology and…
more Biostatistics at UCSF and a staff physician at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. Dr. Whooley’s research is focused on understanding the links between mental and physical health, particularly the relationship between depression and cardiovascular disease. She is Principal Investigator of the Heart and Soul Study, a prospective cohort study that was originally designed to determine why depression is associated with adverse outcomes among patients with coronary heart disease. The Heart and Soul Study found that depressive symptoms are stronger predictors of health-related quality of life than objective measures of physical health (JAMA, 2003) and demonstrated that the increased risk of cardiovascular events associated with depressive symptoms is explained by poor health behaviors such as smoking, medication non-adherence and physical inactivity (JAMA, 2008). The Heart and Soul study has also provided a rich dataset for other investigators to address many important research questions in behavioral and cardiovascular epidemiology, producing over 100 peer-reviewed publications since 2003. More information is available at www.heartandsoulstudy.net.
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