About Laurel Mellin

Laurel Mellin’s Biography

Laurel an Associate Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine and
Pediatrics at UCSF. She is the founder of Emotional Brain Training (EBT), a
method that rewires self-regulation, the foundation of how we experience
stress and joy in our daily lives. She is a researcher, has written 100s of
training journals and four lay books, including the New York Times
bestseller They Pathway. Her latest book, Wired for Joy, will be release on
June, 2010.

Laurel started developing the method in 1979 as a member of an
interdisciplinary faculty in adolescent health directed by Charles Irwin, MD
and focused on the root causes of obesity and eating disorders. She
discovered at study published in 1940 by Baylor College of Medicine's Hilde
Bruch that identified the root cause as an insufficiency of tools to create
a secure emotional connection between parent and child. Laurel developed a
pediatric obesity program, Shapedown (www.childobesity.org) that taught the
skills of self-regulation to children and parents. The method is still
available nationwide and the Canadian Health System has adopted it. Also,
she developed an internet-based assessment of obesity in young people,
offering an practical way to identify the contributors to the weight gain
and an individualize care plan for responding to the needs of the child and
family ("Youth Evaluation Scale). She wrote for President Clinton the
national guidelines for the prevention and treatment of child and adolescent
obesity.

Laurel's attention turned to applying these same tools to adults for the
treatment of obesity, then for all stress symptoms, and finally to attaining
states of high-level well-being. In the last 10 years, the method has
evolved to integrate neuroplasticity, attachment theory and stress science.
Igor Mitrovic, MD, a neuroscientist and Associate Adjunct Professor of
Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, began
contributing to the development of the conceptual basis of the method. In
2007, Igor conceptualized the homeostatic and allostatic neuronal stress
circuitry aspect of the method. That same year, Laurel reconfigured the
method from a three-point scale to a five-point scale (the EBT 5-Point
System of Emotional and Behavioral Regulation) so that the method mirrored
secure attachment.

It became clear that the purpose of the method was to rewire self-regulation
for optimal stress processing. That stress processing is thought to be
imbedded in the circuitry in a secure attachment between parent and child,
and form the basis for development and optimal well-being. Instead of
treating stress symptoms, these and other breakthroughs in neuroscience
suggested a new paradigm in health care. Instead of excessively relying on
medications, procedures and devices to treat the symptoms of stress or treat
one stress symptom only to see another one arise, we could rewire the brain
to mirror secure attachment, that is, decrease allostatic load and treat the
stress itself.

Currently, Laurel directs the EBT Center of Excellence at UCSF, the national
coordinating center for EBT research, directs the Institute for Health
Solutions, the non-profit organization that certifies health professionals
in the method. She has been involved in a variety of obesity research and
teaching roles, including faculty member in adolescent health training
program, field faculty in public health (UC Berkeley), director of the
Center for Child and Adolescent Obesity, associate director of the Tung
Nutrition Center. She has three children and lives in Marin County,
California.