For more than half a century, Dr. Herbert Weiner was a driving force in the field of psychosomatic medicine. The UCLA Cousins Center for PNI is proud to announce the Herbert Weiner Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship Award in recognition and appreciation of his contributions to the fields of psychosomatic medicine and psychoneuroimmunology. Dr. Weiner has been the unquestioned intellectual leader in psychosomatic medicine: his scholarly writings are intense, exhaustive, and integrative of the many school of thought that define this discipline. Dr. Weiner served as Editor of Psychosomatic Medicine (1972-1982), the most prestigious journal in the field, during the ten-year period in which the journal emerged as the premier forum for research in biopsychologically-oriented psychosomatics. He is the author of Psychobiology and Human Disease (1977), a remarkable work for its quality, comprehensiveness, and significance in the field. His monograph, Perturbing the Organism: The Biology of Stressful Experience (1992) is a crowning achievement of his writings on the relationship between mind, brain and body in health and disease.

We are privileged to have counted Herb among our colleagues at UCLA, where he developed the Psychiatry Department’s research training programs and secured the reputation of a “physician’s physician.” His finest students have become full-time academicians, and carry on his legacy through training programs that he established in psychobiology of the major mental disorders, HIV-AIDS, and psychoneuroimmunology.

In appreciation of Dr. Weiner, the Cousins Center for PNI has established the Herbert Weiner Distinguished Fellow Award. This award recognizes the excellence of one post-doctoral trainee who is currently participating in the Cousins Center Post-Graduate Training Program in Psychoneuroimmunology. Trainees are selected based on the significance and uniqueness of their post-doctoral research emphasizing the interactions among environment, brain, behavior, and the immune- and neuroendocrine systems, and their implications for health.