Maryanna Klatt, PhD

Director, Center for Integrative Medicine

Klatt-Maryanna

Professor, Clinical Family Medicine
Adjunct Professor, College of Nursing
Adjunct Professor, College of Education and Human Ecology

About me

Klatt’s research focus has been to develop and evaluate feasible, cost-effective ways to reduce the risk of stress-related chronic illness for both adults and children. Trained in mindfulness and a certified yoga instructor through Yoga Alliance, she combines these two approaches in a unique approach to stress prevention and reduction. Her adult program, Mindfulness in Motion, is delivered at the worksite, while the program for children, Move into Learning, is a classroom-based intervention. Both programs combine yoga, mindfulness and relaxing music. Specifically, her research has shown that nurses working in a surgical intensive care unit reduced their stress by 40% (shown in their salivary amylase), university faculty and staff slept better, Scandinavian bank employees significantly reduced their perceived stress, cancer survivors and their caregivers became significantly more resilient, and inner-city third-graders significantly improved in hyperactivity and cognitive inattention — behaviors often related to stress. Klatt has shown that mindful awareness interventions produce an average of $4,000 annual cost savings for adult participants up to five years postintervention. In 2011, she delivered a TEDx Columbus talk on her work with stress reduction and resiliency building.

Research, Education and Clinical Interests

Klatt’s greatest contribution to curriculum development at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center has been her creation of the undergraduate educational minor, Integrative Approaches to Health and Wellness (INTHLTH-MN), housed within the Ohio State College of Medicine, and she has created four courses within the minor. These include The Evolving Art and Science of Medicine (College of Medicine), Body/Mind Goes to School (College of Education and Human Ecology), Yoga: Theory and Practice (College of Arts and Science) and an honors course, Mindful Resilience: From the Individual to the Organization, which was designed to teach resiliency skills to pre-professionals.

Klatt also teaches a freshman seminar, The Mindful College Student, to provide students early coping strategies to sustain a successful academic career at Ohio State. Students across disciplines at Ohio State have reaped the benefits of Klatt’s energy and enthusiasm, both in person and through her curriculum development, which will outlive her employment as a faculty member.

The strongest pedagogical technique that Klatt utilizes in the classroom is the creation of community among students. It’s important to her to balance technological innovation (which has the potential for human isolation) and the joy that’s possible through human, in-person connection. That said, Klatt recognizes the capacity for innovative web-based practices that can support and scale what happens in the classroom. Thus, her educational mindfulness intervention, Mindfulness in Motion (MIM), is a hybrid program, including weekly in-person classroom sessions with daily online practices. The Department of Family and Community Medicine hosts the online learning platform website that enables Klatt’s students to individually access written tips, her audio and video practices and hot links that extend classroom teaching. This site is customized for four types of students — college students, health care professionals, busy working adults and cancer survivors. Stress reduction and resiliency building have been the foci of Klatt’s teaching and research career. Since 2018, 475 learners have been through her MIM educational innovation, and over 700 learners since its inception. It’s currently offered to the community at Ohio State’s Center for Integrative Medicine. Interested in starting a group at your workplace? Email mindfulnessinmotion@osumc.edu

Current Research Projects

Klatt’s recent focus has been to reduce burnout and increase resilience for health care professionals, with a specific interest in developing and evaluating enhanced emotional/cognitive and movement programming using mindfulness interventions to change health care professionals’ response to stress. She believes that both the organization and the individual need to attend to, and be responsible for, creating healthy work environments. Working with the Graduate Medical Education Office, she’s researching the effectiveness of MIM for interprofessional health care professionals to reduce burnout and increase resiliency.

Additionally, Klatt is actively constructing and delivering mindfulness training modules, which includes context-specific yoga stretching and relaxation for health care working professionals. The focus of this research is the impact on the risk of work-related musculoskeletal disorders among first responders, inside a hospital setting and in the community. Her goal is to keep health care professionals engaged by teaching them how to focus on patient-centered, relationship-based care via mindful awareness, proper body alignment and worksite stress reduction techniques. Her expertise is in designing mindful movement content that can be uniformly delivered in health care educational programs.

Her current research with patients involves reducing preoperative anxiety via a mindfulness meditation as patients wait for their surgical procedure.

Education and Training

  • PhD: Educational Policy and Leadership, The Ohio State University, 2002
  • MA: Medical Ethics, University of Virginia, 1991
  • BA: Psychology, Kenyon College, 1982

Postgraduate Education and Training

  • Mindfulness-based stress reduction in mind-body medicine, Center for Mindfulness, University of Massachusetts Medical School, 2003
  • Integrative Yoga Therapy Teacher Training Program, Yoga Alliance, 500-hour certification, 2008
  • Mindful Practice in Medicine, University of Rochester School of Medicine, 2010
  • Summer seminar on Contemplative Education, Smith College, 2015

Professional Memberships

  • Editorial board member, Global Advances in Health and Medicine
  • Member, Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine Steering Committee, 2004-present
  • Member, Medicine and the Arts Board, The Ohio State University College of Medicine, 2012-present
  • Member, North American Primary Care Research Group, 2014-present

Contact

Northwood-High Building
2231 N. High Street
Suite 261
Columbus, Ohio 43201
Phone: 614-293-3644
Maryanna.Klatt@osumc.edu

Helpful Links