Interview with Wayne Jonas

Wayne Jonas, M.D., is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Samueli Institute. He has had a long and distinguished career as a student, practitioner, and researcher of conventional medicine as well as complementary and alternative medical (CAM) practices.

His experience includes service as an administrator; international conference chairman, speaker, panel moderator, peer reviewer and author of books and scientific articles on conventional and CAM topics. In addition to his position as President and CEO of the Samueli Institute, he is currently an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, where he co-founded a CAM curriculum. Dr. Jonas served as Director of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health from 1995 until 1999 and prior to that was Director of the Medical Research Fellowship at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Washington, D.C.

In addition to his conventional medical education, he is trained in family medicine and clinical pastoral care, diet and nutritional therapy, mind-body therapies, spiritual healing, electro-acupuncture diagnostics, homeopathy, and bioenergy therapy. His current research interests include projects on Information Biology(TM), the placebo effect, cancer, the biological effects of low level toxin exposures (hormesis), homeopathy, spiritual and "energy" healing, and the quality of research on outcomes. Dr. Jonas is a graduate of Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina and Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Dr. Jonas attended the North American Research Conference on Complementary and Alternative Medicine in May 2009. While there, he spent some time talking with staff from the Center for the Spirituality & Healing at the University of Minnesota. See his interview below.