Center for Integrative Medicine

Center Base Path
medicine

Lauray MacElhern

First Name
Lauray
Last Name
MacElhern
Credentials (Display)
MBA
Institution Affiliation
UC San Diego
REACH Roles
Leadership
Lead Administrator
UCSD REACH Team
Headshot Image
Lauray MacElhern, PhD
Titles
Managing Director, Centers for Integrative Health
Research Areas
Acupuncture, CIH outcomes, EMR-based research
Research Profile URL
https://profiles.ucsd.edu/lauray.macelhern
Organizational Roles
Instructor
Staff
Short Bio

Lauray has spent her career teaching healing cooking and building integrative nutrition programs — co-founding UC San Diego's Natural Healing & Cooking Program and training chefs, clinicians, and communities to put food at the center of health.

Bio

Lauray MacElhern has spent her career cooking, studying, and experimenting with healing foods — working alongside physicians, dietitians, and chefs to teach healing cooking classes at hospitals, cancer centers, universities, and academic health centers.

As Managing Director of the UC San Diego Centers for Integrative Health, she oversees the business administration, strategy, operations, marketing, finance, management, and development of its five Centers: the Center for Integrative Medicine, Center for Mindfulness, Krupp Center for Integrative Research, Center for Integrative Education, and Center for Integrative Nutrition. One of the founding members of the Centers for Integrative Health in 2011, Lauray has supported its growth from a 10-person micro-granted program into a nearly 100-person, multi-Center organization.

In her role co-directing the Center for Integrative Nutrition, Lauray brings deep expertise in curriculum development. She is co-founder, teacher, and trainer of the UC San Diego Natural Healing & Cooking Program and co-developer of the UC San Diego Certificate in Integrative Nutrition: Food As Medicine. She serves on the boards of the Krupp Endowed Fund and of the prestigious Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health.

Lauray joined UC San Diego after running The Cancer Project, a Washington, D.C.–based non-profit dedicated to nutrition education and research for cancer prevention and survival. There she worked with and trained more than 100 chefs around the world to teach the organization's award-winning cooking and nutrition courses, reaching millions through public outreach and within community centers, hospitals, and medical centers in more than 160 cities across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Panama, Jamaica, India, and Spain. For the prior decade, she held technology, management, marketing, and leadership roles contributing to the start-up and growth of three companies, earning formal recognition from NASA and the Telly Awards for her work.

From an early age, Lauray has been personally immersed in and passionate about healing cooking, natural medicine, Ayurveda, and Chinese medicine. She earned her bachelor's degree in communication and commerce through coursework in the Wharton School and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and pursued advanced coursework in nutrition sciences through extension programs at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, and American University. She earned her MBA from the Rady School of Management, where she was a recipient of the Pauline Foster MBA Fellowship.

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Advancing Research and Education in Osteopathic Manual Medicine

Advancing Research and Education in Osteopathic Manual Medicine

The purpose of this effort is to strengthen the research and educational foundation of UC San Diego's Osteopathic Manual Medicine Program — deepening our understanding of how people heal, improving patient outcomes, and securing OMM's place at the forefront of academic medicine.

Our mission is to advance osteopathic manual medicine through rigorous research, clinical education, and scholarly inquiry, building both the evidence base and the next generation of practitioners equipped to carry this work forward.

Our vision is a future where the full therapeutic potential of osteopathic manual medicine is understood, validated, and accessible — recognized not as an alternative to evidence-based medicine, but as one of its most compelling frontiers.  

Background

Osteopathic manual medicine (OMM) begins with a radical premise: that the body is not merely a machine to be repaired, but a living, self-organizing system with an inherent capacity to heal. For over a century, skilled practitioners have worked with this intelligence — using carefully trained hands to sense, engage, and support the body's own regulatory processes. The results have been clinically meaningful. The mechanisms have remained difficult to explain. That's exactly the problem we're here to solve.

The Center for Integrative Medicine at UC San Diego, established in 2011 as part of the nationally recognized Centers for Integrative Health, opened critical institutional space for practices long held at the margins of conventional care. The growth of integrative medicine at UC San Diego traces in part to the clinical excellence and outcomes of our OMM consultation service, now one of the largest and most successful in the country. That consultation service has also become something more: a platform for rigorous research and clinical education in OMM.

UC San Diego has pioneered embedding OMM directly into hospital workflows, allowing Doctors of Osteopathic Medicine (DOs) to deliver hands-on, insurance-reimbursable treatment during acute care episodes at the bedside. This relieves pain, improves mobility, and hastens recovery in real time — creating a living laboratory to study how osteopathic manual medicine influences healing as it unfolds.

UC San Diego's OMM Program occupies a rare and important position — an osteopathic manual medicine initiative embedded within one of the country's leading research universities. This creates opportunity to pursue OMM research with scientific precision while maintaining genuine respect for the depth of osteopathic philosophy.

This is some of the most important work happening in manual medicine today. 

Your support makes this possible.

Use of Funds

Philanthropic gifts will support:

  • High-impact research projects and dissemination of findings
  • Educational programming, including CME courses and conferences
  • Infrastructure to sustain and grow OMM research and training

Funds will be managed in accordance with UC San Diego policies and directed to a dedicated account supporting OMM efforts, under the direction of Alice I. Chen, DO, current OMM Medical Director, Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Medicine, and Board-Certified in Osteopathic Neuromusculoskeletal Medicine.

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Initiatives

We are in the process of completing the first systematic account of our inpatient OMM service at UC San Diego, documenting patient demographics, referral patterns, and billing data. This positions us to build a national practice-based research network (PBRN) that connects osteopathic clinicians and researchers, enabling multi-center studies and accelerating evidence generation.

Despite OMM's varied clinical applications, few hospital systems have inpatient consultation services. UC San Diego Health is among the first academic health centers to establish one — a distinction that creates a unique and timely research opportunity. Studying how this service operates — how it is staffed, who refers patients and why, and what courses of care look like, can inform the development of hospital-based OMM programs nationwide. It may also surface gaps in the osteopathic training pipeline that contribute to OMM's underutilization in clinical practice. And by evaluating the health economic impact — including billing practices, reimbursement patterns, and effects on length of stay — we can build the case for broader adoption and sustainable funding of services like this one.

We recently published a study in patients following acoustic neuroma resection that demonstrated that integrating OMM immediately after surgery reduced hospital length of stay and opioid use. Building on this, future studies will explore how introducing OMM earlier — into the preoperative setting — can further improve resilience, recovery, and clinical outcomes. These studies will also investigate the mechanisms by which OMM supports healing, moving us closer to understanding not just that it works, but how.

We are launching a study to evaluate OMM in preterm newborns with feeding difficulties. This pilot will assess feasibility, safety, and early outcomes — including feeding progress, weight gain, and length of hospital stay — laying the groundwork for larger trials that could meaningfully improve neonatal intensive care.

UC San Diego will convene global experts in OMM research as we host the 3rd Annual Conference on Osteopathic Research and Knowledge (CORK), September 9–10, 2026 in San Diego, California. In collaboration with leaders across the field, we aim to create a platform for rigorous discourse and consensus-building among OMM researchers — aligning our work with National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) priorities to ensure relevance and impact within the broader scientific community studying touch-based treatments.

We envision an Osteopathic Neuromusculoskeletal Medicine (ONMM) residency program embedded within an academic health system — one that pairs rigorous clinical training with a genuine research culture. Residents will develop advanced OMM skills through apprenticeship-based mentorship, delivering patient-centered care while building the investigative skills to advance the field.

Why Support This Work

The missing piece is you. 

Osteopathic manual medicine offers something increasingly rare in modern healthcare: a rigorous, hands-on approach to healing that treats the whole person — not just the condition. Imagine receiving best-in-class surgical care to treat a condition, and then a skilled osteopathic physician at your bedside supporting your recovery in real time. At UC San Diego, we have the clinical infrastructure, the research environment, and the expertise to take this work to the next level. What we need is your support.

By investing in UC San Diego’s OMM program, you help us:

  • Understand how people heal through touch-based, integrative approaches — and build the evidence to prove it
  • Improve patient outcomes across diverse populations and care settings
  • Generate research that informs national clinical standards and policy
  • Train the next generation of osteopathic physicians and researchers

The stakes are real. As healthcare grapples with the limits of pharmacologic-first treatment, OMM offers a proven, reimbursable, scalable alternative — one grounded in the body's own capacity for recovery. This program is where that alternative gets rigorously tested, taught, and advanced.

Your support makes this possible.

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