Jacek Kolacz
Assistant Professor
Psychiatry and Behavioral Health
Academic information
- Department: Psychiatry and Behavioral Health
Research interests
- Wearable Sensing to Track Outcomes and Predict Treatment Response
- Interventions for Improving Emotion Regulation and Reducing Hyperarousal
- Trauma Recovery
About
Biography
I am a research assistant professor at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. I study how the brain and body coordinate to shape emotional responses, the ways in which life history shapes reactions to stress and threats and how insights about these processes can make clinical interventions more effective. My research explores how chronic threat responses affect emotions in concert with functions of the body such as the heart, gut and muscles that control vocal intonation. I use wearable sensors to noninvasively measure physiological activity in lab studies, in clinics and at home.
I lead ongoing projects to study the role of brain-body responses in trauma recovery and develop new methods to noninvasively measure physiological stress. My research is supported by the NIH to study the effects of mindfulness on anxiety and body stress responses and to identify physiological profiles of patients with chronic gastrointestinal diseases that are exacerbated by stress.
I have co-authored more than 30 articles in peer-reviewed journals like Developmental Psychobiology, Psychological Trauma and the American Journal of Gastroenterology. I have received awards from the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition and the Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome Association. I am regularly invited to discuss my research at conferences across the United States and around the world.
Credentials
Education
- Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
- Indiana University, Traumatic Stress Research Consortium at the Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, IN, United States
- PhD - Developmental Psychology and Quantitative Concentrations
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States
Research
Research interests
- Wearable Sensing to Track Outcomes and Predict Treatment Response
- Interventions for Improving Emotion Regulation and Reducing Hyperarousal
- Trauma Recovery
Active Funding
- Site PI: Digital health platform to deliver mindfulness as a Stress Management Intervention Leveraging on Electronic (SMILE) health records for racial and ethnic populations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Multi-year project funded by the NIH National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities
- Co-investigator: Brain-gut-genome profiling in connective tissue disorder-related gastrointestinal dysfunction. Multi-year project funded by the NIH National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases