W. Thomas Boyce
Program
Child and Brain Development
Appointment
Senior Fellow; Program Co-Director
Institution
University of British Columbia
Country
Canada 
W. Thomas Boyce is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of British Columbia, and is the Sunny Hill Health Centre BC Leadership Chair in Child Development in the Human Early Learning Partnership and the Centre for Community Child Health Research. He is also a member of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. Previously, he was Professor of Epidemiology and Child Development in the School of Public Health and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Research at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB). He was also a member of UCB's Institute of Human Development, as well as co-Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars Program at UCB and the University of California at San Francisco.
Dr. Boyce received his B.A. in Philosophy and Psychology from Stanford University in 1968 and his M.D. from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas in 1972. He completed his internship and residency in pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco, and then held a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholarship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has also held faculty appointments at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center and the University of California at San Francisco.
Dr. Boyce's research addresses the interplay among neurobiological and psychosocial processes leading to socially partitioned differences in childhood disease. Studying the interactive influences of socioeconomic adversities and neurobiological responses, his work has demonstrated how psychological stress and neurobiological reactivity to aversive social contexts operate conjointly to produce disorders of both physical and mental health in childhood populations. A central goal of his work is the development of a new synthesis between biomedical and social epidemiologic accounts of human pathogenesis and an articulation of the public health implications of this synthetic view.
