Jeff Levin
Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University Medical Center
A.B. Duke University
M.P.H. University of North Carolina
Ph.D.
University of Texas Medical Branch
Jeff Levin, an epidemiologist by training, is a pioneering scientist whose research, beginning in the early 1980s, helped to create the field of religion and health. Both biomedical scientist and religious scholar, his work at the interface of religion, science, and medicine has been instrumental in broadening perspectives on connections among body, mind, and spirit. He left a successful academic career in 1997 to devote his full-time efforts to writing and consulting.
Dr. Levin was the first scientist to systematically review the empirical literature on religion and health, and the first scientist funded by the NIH to conduct research on the topic. He is a Past President of the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, is a member of the Extended Faculty of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, was Chairman of the NIH Working Group on Quantitative Methods in Alternative Medicine, and has served on the editorial boards of numerous peer-reviewed journals. He has authored over 150 scholarly publications, mostly on the instrumental functions of religion for human well-being. He has written or edited eight books, notably God, Faith, and Health and the forthcoming Divine Love: Perspectives from the World’s Religions. According to the Institute for Scientific Information, since 1981 Dr. Levin has been one of the most highly cited social scientists in the world.
Dr. Levin’s current work is four-fold: population-health research on altruistic and divine love, conceptual and theoretical analysis of the work of healers, development of a salutogenic model of the natural history of health, and exploration of biblical and rabbinic perspectives on themes in Jewish moral theology. He is currently writing or editing books on each of these topics. Dr. Levin lives in Kansas with his wife, Dr. Lea Steele. His website is located at www.religionandhealth.com.
