The Harvard Medical School Research Fellowship in Integrative Medicine is a NIH-funded three year joint program of Harvard Medical School-affiliated teaching hospitals. The program accepts postdoctoral candidates including physicians, anthropologists, health behaviorists, sociologists, psychologists and integrative medicine (IM) providers with doctoral degrees who are interested in research training towards academic careers in integrative medicine.
Read below to learn more about Dr. Kraemer and what motivates her research at the Osher Center.
What is your area of focus?
My research focuses on examining mind-body interventions for promoting healthy behaviors (e.g., physical activity) among individuals with cardiopulmonary conditions. I aim to understand how (i.e., through which mechanisms) and why (i.e., through which intervention components) mind-body interventions improve healthy behaviors. This research will allow me to optimize mind-body interventions for successful health behavior change.
What motivates your work?
Involved with sports from an early age, I have always been interested in what drives or inhibits people to engage in healthy behaviors. This interest led to my graduate studies in psychology. As a trainee and clinical health psychologist, I learned that health behavior change is far more complex than I imagined because it involves biological, cognitive, emotional, environmental, and social processes. Unfortunately, there are few resources available to comprehensively address health behavior change. This led me to pursue a career focused on optimizing interventions to better target these processes and help individuals initiate and sustain healthy behaviors.
I aim to draw on implementation science, which focuses on enhancing the uptake of evidence-based interventions, to better disseminate mind-body interventions in the community. Specifically, I hope to leverage technology to increase the accessibility of mind-body interventions for individuals struggling with health behavior change.
Kraemer, K.M., Luberto, C.M., Hall, D.L., Ngo, L.H. and Yeh, G.Y., 2020. A systematic review and meta-analysis of mindfulness-and acceptance-based interventions for affect intolerance/sensitivity. Behaviour Research and Therapy, p.103746.
Kraemer, K.M. and McLeish, A., 2019. Evaluating the role of mindfulness in terms of asthma-related outcomes and depression and anxiety symptoms among individuals with asthma. Psychology, health & medicine, 24(2), pp.155-166.
Kraemer, K. M., Luberto, C. M., O’Bryan, E. M., Mysinger, E., & Cotton, S. (2016). Mind-body skills training to improve distress tolerance in medical students: A pilot study. Teaching and Learning in Medicine, 28, 219-228.