Dr. Jeffrey Bland is a personable and highly respected thought leader who has spent more than four decades focused on the improvement of human health. He is known worldwide as the founder of the Functional Medicine movement, which represents his vision for a care model that is grounded in systems biology and informed by research that he has a unique ability to synthesize. His pioneering work has created the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute (PLMI), as well as the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM), the global leader in Functional Medicine education. Since 1991, hundreds of thousands of healthcare practitioners have participated in PLMI and IFM programs, and this collective knowledge has positively impacted the lives of patients all over the world.

Dr. Bland began his career as a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Puget Sound. He is a natural educator and became involved with numerous academic institutions during the years he spent teaching. This includes the significant contributions he made to the founding and accreditation of Bastyr University, the first federally accredited university offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in natural medicine in the US. In the early 1980s, Dr. Bland was hand-selected by two-time Nobel Laureate Dr. Linus Pauling to serve as Director of Nutritional Research at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. This experience marked both a personal and professional inflection point for Dr. Bland that has become an integral part of his career.