Simmie Foster, MD, PH.D. (Former CEC Scholar)

Instructor in Psychiatry

Research Scientist

Depression Clinical and Research Program

Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Simmie Foster is a practicing psychiatrist and research scientist in Depression Clinical and Research Program (DCRP) at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Dr. Foster graduated with honors in molecular and cell biology from the University of California at Berkeley, then completed her MD and PhD at Yale School of Medicine with Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov. Her graduate thesis research on inflammation resulted in a first-author publication in the journal Nature. Subsequently, she completed medical internship at MGH, psychiatry residency at the University of Pennsylvania, and a postdoctoral research fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Clifford Woolf, Director of the Kirby Center for Neurobiology at Boston Children’s Hospital, before joining the staff at the DCRP in 2016. She has received multiple awards including a position as a scholar in the Harvard-wide K12 Building Interdisciplinary Careers in Women’s Health program, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund postdoctoral fellowship, and the Jerome and Celia Reich Award in Depression Research. She has given a TEDx talk on “Pain and Immunity: What’s Sex got to do with it?”

Dr. Foster’s research studies the complex relationship between the immune system and the nervous system in inflammatory diseases, such as depression; and why these disorders of inflammation disproportionately affect women. Most recently, she has started to investigate the temperature dependence of neuro-immune interactions, taking a translational approach to investigate the anti-inflammatory and proteostatic effects of hyperthermia. Ultimately her goal is to develop a better understanding of the inflammatory basis of depression through a sex differences lens and point the way to making more effective treatments for patients.

Publications

S.L. Foster, C. Seehus, C.J. Woolf, and S. Talbot. Sense and immunity: context dependent neuroimmune interplay. Frontiers in Immunology. 2017 Nov 3;8:1463. R.A. Ross, S.L. Foster, D.F. Ionescu. The role of chronic stress in anxious depression. Chronic Stress. 2017 Jan 1; 1.

M.D. Cheatle, S.L. Foster, A. Pinkett,, M. Lesneski, D. Qu, L. Dhingra. Assessing and Managing Sleep Disturbance in Patients with Chronic Pain. Anesthesiology Clinics. 2016 Jun; 34(2): 379-93.

S. Talbot, S.L. Foster and C.J. Woolf. Neuroimmune physiology and pathology. Ann. Rev. Imm. 2016 May 20;34:421-47. *co-first authors

S.L. Foster, D.C. Hargreaves, and R. Medzhitov. Gene-specific control of inflammation by TLR-induced chromatin modifications. Nature. 2007 Jun 21;447(7147):972-8.