Instructor in Medicine

Catherine Kerr received her BA from Amherst College and her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University. She currently holds a NIH K01 mentored research grant awarded by NCCAM in 2006. She uses neuroimaging and behavioral approaches to investigate mind-body therapies and the sense of touch. She is looking specifically at whether some mind-body therapies not typically regarded as touch-based (including mindfulness based stress reduction [MBSR] or Tai Chi) work by eliciting changes in neural processes and structures that encode touch and bodily sensations. She is working in collaboration with investigators at MIT and MGH and maintains the Kerr Lab at the Osher Research Center.