Skip to main contentLink to External Link Policy

Because of a lapse in Government funding, the information on this website may not be up to date, transactions submitted via the website may not be processed, and the agency may not be able to respond to inquiries until appropriations are enacted.

The NIH Clinical Center (the research hospital of NIH) is open. For more details about its operating status, please visit cc.nih.gov.

Updates regarding Government operating status and resumption of normal operations can be found at OPM.gov.

Información en Español
National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health

Concept: Interdisciplinary Research Networks To Advance the Science of Resilience and Health Optimization

Project Concept Review

Council Approval: September 19, 2025         

Program Directors: Erin Burke Quinlan, Ph.D. and Jennifer Baumgartner, Ph.D.

Background

Americans across the lifespan are experiencing alarming levels of stress—defined as the physical and emotional responses to challenges in life. While occasional stress is normal and can be adaptive, stress levels that persist over time (chronic stress) can negatively impact health and well-being. Exposures to a range of physical and psychosocial stressors such as viral infections, burnout, bullying, environmental toxins, and natural disasters have the potential to “get under the skin” and contribute to the onset or progression of chronic diseases. Addressing this problem requires more than treating disease after it occurs. It calls for a whole person health approach to identify and target strategies that strengthen the capacity to withstand and recover from stress to optimize health and prevent disease. The biomedical study of resilience represents a promising area for promoting overall well-being and population health. 

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Resilience Research Working Group has taken significant steps toward providing conceptual clarity and harmonization of resilience research. According to the NIH Resilience Research Working Group’s conceptual model, resilience is defined as the capacity to resist, adapt to, recover from, or grow from a challenge. These outcomes of resilience—resistance, adaptation, recovery, or growth—are dependent on the functioning of systems that span across multiple, often ­interconnecting domains, including individual (molecular, cellular, physiological, psychological), community, and environmental levels of analysis. By identifying and targeting the internal and external mechanisms and protective factors (and/or pathways) that buffer or strengthen systems, the framework aims to improve health despite stressor exposure. The unified definition of resilience and conceptual model were featured in a supplemental issue of Stress & Health, “Harmonizing the Science of Resilience.”

In light of the chronic disease epidemic, the time is right to apply these products to grow a rigorous and reproducible body of evidence on resilience and health optimization. To this end, an NIH workshop held in 2024, “Advancing the Biomedical Science of Resilience: A Discussion of Measures and Metrics,” emphasized the need for standardized measurements and metrics of resilience, experimental design protocols, and interdisciplinary collaborations to further advance the field. Another critical gap is the dearth of rigorous prospective studies on mechanisms of resilience within and across domains. This collective lack of knowledge limits understanding of how resilience can positively influence health and the extent to which interventions like complementary and integrative health approaches, such as those with physical and psychological inputs (often called mind and body practices) and natural products including dietary supplements, among others, promote resilience outcomes and their putative mechanisms. 

Purpose of Proposed Initiative

To address these gaps, the proposed National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health and Office of Dietary Supplements–led initiative aims to support cooperative agreements involving highly innovative, interdisciplinary research networks that advance the biomedical science of resilience and generate knowledge and resources that serve the field at large. Supported activities may include meetings, conferences, small-scale pilots, educational opportunities (e.g., workshops, visiting scholar programs), and dissemination activities to encourage growth and development of the specified priority areas listed below. These programs must be aligned with the NIH Resilience Conceptual Model and include discussion of, at a minimum, a clearly defined challenge/stressor, system(s), and resilience response/outcome(s).

Objectives

The research priorities supported by this concept may include, but are not limited to:

  • Grow the resilience research community: Support interdisciplinary research networks to foster resilience research through meetings, conferences, cross-training, collaborations, and pilot research projects.
  • Measures/metrics that capture resilience outcomes: Develop research measures to capture the core components of resilience (i.e., resist, adapt, recover, or grow) and their impacts on health.
  • Mechanistic research on the role of resilience and health: Identify and develop evidence of malleable protective pathways and/or protective factors that contribute to resilience at the individual (e.g., molecular, cellular, physiological, and psychological), community, and environmental levels. This includes basic mechanism-focused target validation research (e.g., identify a putative intervention target, identify/develop experimental methods/measures that engage the target, validate the target) as needed.
  • Biomarkers of resilience: Identify biomarkers and predictive pathways of resilience essential for testing and optimizing interventions across the lifespan. Develop predictive models for interventions to promote resilience.
  • Development of resources to capture measures within and across domains: Develop an infrastructure (e.g., interactive database, registry/repository) that can be used for collating measures of resilience (e.g., biomarkers, outcomes) to be validated within and across domains.

For More Information