Rate My Professor Mustafa al’Absi

Mustafa al’Absi, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Biobehavioral Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School, holding the Max & Mary La Due Pickworth Endowed Chair. He also serves as an adjunct professor in Psychiatry and Epidemiology, and as a graduate faculty member in the Departments of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology, and Integrated Biological Sciences. al’Absi directs the Behavioral Medicine Laboratories at the Duluth and Minneapolis sites of the Medical School, the Duluth Global Health Research Institute, the Khat Research Program, and the Stress and Resilience Research Labs. He completed his undergraduate studies in Psychology and Biology at Cairo University and earned his PhD in Biological and Clinical Psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Over twenty years, he has built a distinguished career focused on biobehavioral mechanisms underlying stress, addiction, and health risks.

al’Absi’s research integrates basic laboratory, clinical, and field approaches to elucidate how stress contributes to tobacco relapse and cardiovascular disease. His early studies, funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the American Heart Association, identified hypoalgesia and altered stress responses as endophenotypes of hypertension. Subsequent work, supported by multiple R01 grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and National Cancer Institute, has examined blunted hormonal responses in smokers predicting relapse, the roles of endogenous opioids and cannabinoids, and associations with appetite regulation and weight gain during withdrawal. He has developed wearable sensor technologies for real-time stress and tobacco use monitoring in natural settings to facilitate just-in-time interventions. Globally, al’Absi leads efforts on tobacco-khat co-use and research capacity building in low- and middle-income countries in Africa and Asia through programs funded by the Fogarty International Center and NIDA. He has authored more than 200 scientific articles and two books. His contributions are recognized with awards including the Neal E. Miller Award, Herbert Weiner Award, NIDA Award of Excellence in Collaborative Research, and NSF Smart Health and Wellbeing award. A Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, he has held leadership positions such as President of the American Psychosomatic Society, Chair of the Africa and Middle East Congress on Addiction, board member of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and associate editor for Psychophysiology and Biological Psychology.