Dr. Creswell serves as a tenured associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the director of the Health & Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University.
In 2000, Dr. Creswell received his bachelor’s degree in psychology, with distinction (cum laude), from Colorado College. He received his master’s degree in social psychology in 2003 and his Ph.D. in social psychology—with minors in health psychology, quantitative measurement, and psychometrics—in 2007, both from the University of California (Los Angeles). From 2007 to 2008, Dr. Creswell served as an NIMH Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology (School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles).
Dr. Creswell’s research focuses broadly on understanding what makes people resilient under stress. Specifically, he conducts community intervention studies, laboratory studies of stress and coping, and neuroimaging studies to understand how various stress management strategies alter coping and stress resilience. For example, he is currently working on studies that test how mindfulness meditation training impacts the brain, peripheral-stress physiological responses, and stress-related disease outcomes in at-risk community samples. Dr. Creswell also explores how the use of simple strategies (self-affirmation, rewarding activities, cognitive reappraisal) can buffer stress and improve problem-solving under pressure.
Dr. Creswell has made some recent research forays into other areas, such as in describing the role of unconscious processes in learning and decision making, developing new theory and research on behavioral priming, and building a new field of health neuroscience.
Dr. Creswell’s work has been published in general science, health psychology, social psychology, neuroscience, and medical journals. He was recognized in 2011 as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science, and in 2014 received the American Psychological Association Early Career Award for his scientific contributions to psychology.
Dr. Creswell utilizes the Unified Mindfulness system in his research.
David Creswell Carnegie Mellon University: www.cmu.edu
Health & Human Performance Laboratory: www.psy.cmu.edu/~creswell
Google Scholar: www.scholar.google.com/citations
2017 Elected Fellow, Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research
2017 American Psychosomatic Society Herbert Weiner Early Career Award
2015 Social Personality Health Network Early Career Award
2014 American Psychological Association (APA) Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology
2014 Elected Fellow, Society of Experimental Social Psychology
2012 Elected Fellow, Mind and Life Institute
2011 Association for Psychological Science ‘Rising Star’
2008 American Psychosomatic Society Scholar Award ($500)
2006 UCLA Excellence in Research Award ($750)
2005 Harold H. Kelley Award for Best Basic Research Paper in Social Psychology
2005 UCLA Department of Psychology Distinguished Teaching Award
2004 UCLA Graduate Division Summer Research Mentor Award
2000 Cornelia Manley Sabine Award in Psychology at Colorado College
Asterisk (*) indicates a student first-authored publication from the Health & Human Performance Laboratory.
Creswell, J.D. (2014). Early Career Award Biography. American Psychologist, 69, 743-745.