The one-year fellowship begins in April 2023 at the SBM Annual Meeting & Scientific Sessions.
Established in 2016, the SBM Leadership Institute seeks to foster self-awareness and helps mid-career scientists acquire skills such as managing collaborative teams, influencing others, and mentoring. Fellows partner with leaders in behavioral medicine on a project and receive individualized career coaching from professional career coaches throughout the year.
Smolderen currently serves as the chair of the Health Advocacy & Policy Council for the Health Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association. She has a long-standing track record of advocacy before that within the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and American Heart Association (AHA). She is a fellow of the ACC and the AHA. She serves as the co-chair for the American Heart Association’s Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) national action plan geared towards activating health care systems. She is a member of the American College of Cardiology’s Peripheral Vascular Disease Leadership Council, the AHA’s PVD council and Assistant Editor to ACC CardioSmart, a national platform to promote shared decision making in vascular populations, and serves on editorial boards of Vascular Medicine, Health Psychology, and Psychosomatic Medicine.
Smolderen has published over 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts, including a roadmap for the field of health psychology to sustainably extend existing holistic, integrated approaches in cardiovascular care. Her research focuses on a multidisciplinary, patient-centered model to help improve the outcomes of patients with PAD and cardiovascular disease more broadly, through the delivery of integrated care models, including behavioral health care. The experiences of the Behavioral Medicine Leadership Institute will be instrumental and timely to provide guidance on the implementation of integrated behavioral health clinical program that she is leading with colleague Carlos Mena-Hurtado, MD, as it launches its pilot efforts in the vascular medicine service line.