ASU lands renowned expert in psychoneuroendocrinology
Johns Hopkins’ Douglas Granger joins psychology faculty in August
Douglas A. Granger, a widely known psychoneuroendocrinology researcher at Johns Hopkins University, will join the faculty of Arizona State University this summer.
Granger has been appointed Foundation Professor of Psychology and inaugural director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Salivary Bioscience Research. He begins his new position in August.
"We are thrilled to have Doug Granger joining ASU and the Department of Psychology as the inaugural director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Salivary Bioscience Research,” said Keith Crnic, department chairman and professor of psychology. “His work with the institute will be catalytic in forging new scientific directions for our efforts in understanding the complex biological bases of behavior, as well as in developing new health behavior models that will influence the ways we understand health related processes for decades to come."
Granger’s research is focused on the development and application of non-invasive measures of biological processes and systems using oral fluids. This systematic effort has facilitated the emergence of an interdisciplinary field, “salivary bioscience,” and the integration of minimally invasive measures (in oral fluid) of a wide range of biomarkers into behavioral, developmental, social and health sciences.
“Among the core goals of my research is to use the minimally invasive measurement tools I have developed to make a difference in the lives of children, youth and families,” said Granger, professor of nursing, public health and medicine at Johns Hopkins. “The field of salivary bioscience is emerging and our ability to harness the new knowledge has the potential to make a major difference in people's lives.”
During his career, Granger has pioneered the integration of salivary biomarkers and analytes into basic developmental science. He has studied hormone-behavior relationships across the lifespan (infants, children, adults and the elderly), in extremely high risk and clinical samples (clinic-referred children, maltreated and abused adolescents, victimized children, mentally ill patients, mothers and infants in the context of rural poverty), as well as in low-risk (head start) and normative samples.
“Today, we have sufficient basic and descriptive information to begin to employ these tools and to determine whether they will add value to prevention and intervention science,” Granger said.
He said he is “delighted” to be joining ASU, a university that is not only a leader in promoting health, but has broken down academic silos and made transdisciplinary research and learning the standard.
“Over the next course of my career at ASU, I intend to focus and extensively collaborate in an effort to broadly employ these tools in the context of developmental science, public health and medical research.”
Before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, Granger was on the faculty of Pennsylvania State University in the Departments of Biobehavioral Health; Human Development and Family Studies.
In addition to working in academia, Granger is the founder and chief scientific and strategy advisor for the company, Salimetrics. With corporate headquarters in Pennsylvania and the UK, Salimetrics supports thousands of salivary researchers, in more than 20 countries around the world. Salimetrics assays have been used in more saliva-related published papers than any other assay in the field.
Granger earned his bachelor's, master's and doctorate in psychology and social behavior from the University of California, Irvine. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Psychology, Fernald Child Study Center and in the Norman Cousins Program in Psychoneuroimmunology, School of Medicine, Center for Interdisciplinary Research of Immunology and Disease.