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Annesa Fletje, PhD

Annesa Flentje, PhD

Annesa Fletje, PhD, a clinical psychologist who uses multiple methods to understand the impacts of stress and coping on human health and disease. Her research has investigated how stress directly impacts health outcomes and how these processes are mediated through both behaviors (e.g., substance use and coping) and molecular mechanisms (e.g., epigenetics and transcriptional regulation). Dr. Flentje has developed cognitive behavioral interventions to reduce stress, and identified these as a mechanism to alter immune pathways in gene expression. Dr. Flentje is currently leading a large comparative effectiveness study of two interventions for posttraumatic stress symptoms among LGBTQIA+ populations in California. Dr. Flentje has developed and led nationwide mentoring initiatives to support health research of understudied populations and translational research to improve health. Dr. Flentje is Co-Director of The PRIDE Study (pridestudy.org), a national longitudinal cohort study of LGBTQIA+ individuals within the United States that has enrolled over 30,000 participants and is approaching 10 years of data collection.