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Michael Changaris, PsyD
Adjunct Faculty
mchangaris@wi.edu

Michael Changaris, PsyD, is a clinical health psychologist and the Chief Clinical Training Officer for the Wright Institute’s Integrated Health Psychology Training Program (IHPTP), an APA-accredited internship designed to prepare psychologists for leadership in integrated and community-based care. He supports training across rotations in chronic pain, psychopharmacology, and health psychology groups, and teaches at the Wright Institute, University of San Francisco, and formerly at John F. Kennedy University.

Dr. Changaris’s clinical and academic work is rooted in multicultural psychology, stress physiology, and the neurobiology of trauma. His approach integrates clinical neuroscience, cultural humility, and systems thinking to promote resilience and health equity across diverse settings.

A 2018 California Health Care Foundation Leadership Fellow at UCSF, Dr. Changaris has contributed to transformational efforts in public health, safety-net systems, and prison reentry. He was part of the founding team of REMEDY—a trauma-informed, peer-led reentry model developed in collaboration with the Transitions Clinic Network. REMEDY combines group-based trauma therapy, medical care, and peer leadership, and has received national recognition for advancing equity in reentry care.

Dr. Changaris has supported the development of four high-risk pain clinics and contributed to the creation of a countywide opioid policy in collaboration with SOPARC leadership. These efforts helped reduce opioid prescribing and expand access to evidence-based pain care. As a member of the PRIME Behavioral Health Integration Team, he worked with colleagues to improve depression and substance use screening and treatment rates across a system serving over 145,000 patients. This work contributed to the county receiving a statewide award for behavioral health integration and helped sustain over $10 million in state funding.

He has also collaborated in the design and delivery of health equity training and systems reform efforts, including developing a train-the-trainer model that trained more than 800 medical professionals on evidence-based interventions to reduce implicit bias. Working with the PRIME team, he co-developed suicide risk screening and warm handoff protocols that are now used in nine integrated primary care clinics.

In the area of group therapy, Dr. Changaris helped establish a multi-site health psychology group program that offers more than a dozen evidence-based groups across five clinics. These groups support patients dealing with grief, chronic illness, anxiety, weight loss, and behavioral change. The group therapy rotation has provided training and supervision to more than 100 early-career psychologists in group intervention skills.

He has contributed to over 30 invited and peer-reviewed presentations at major academic conferences, including the American Psychological Association (APA), California Psychological Association (CPA), American Public Health Association (APHA), and the Academic and Health Policy Conference on Correctional Health. Recent highlights include:
APA 2025: Driving Public Health with Integrated Behavioral Health (Division 18); Embodied Research Design: Context-Aware Methodologies (Division 5)
CPA 2025: SGM-Focused Healthcare in Integrated Systems
CPA 2024: Closing the Gap in Clinician-Driven Research
APHA 2020: Interrupting ACEs & Toxic Stress in Primary Care
Transitions Clinic Network 2020: Self-Care for Reentry Leaders During COVID-19

Dr. Changaris serves on the Board of Trustees for the California Psychological Association’s Political Action Committee and is an active member of CPA’s Health Psychology Committee and Research Committee. He is also part of the founding editorial team for Field Notes: Research in Action, a CPA publication focused on clinical and clinician-driven research.

His publications span topics in somatic psychology, cultural humility, trauma, and neuroscience, and include:
Winblad, Changaris, & Stein (2018) – SE training and clinician resilience (Frontiers in Neuroscience)
Briggs, Hayes, & Changaris (2018) – Group therapy with gender-diverse clients (Frontiers in Psychiatry)
Touch and Embodiment – Routledge (2019)
Embodied Research Design – Routledge (2020)
Touch: The Neurobiology of Health, Healing, and Human Connection – LifeRhythms Press (2015)
Forthcoming (2025) – Circadian Health and Mental Resilience (Springer Nature)

Across all his work, Dr. Changaris remains committed to fostering equitable, embodied, and integrative approaches to care—centering the wellbeing of patients, providers, and communities.