Ashley Mason, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF.

Her primary research interests focus on food-craving experiences, stress-induced eating, and reward-based eating. She is currently investigating the role of the endogenous opioid system in overeating behavior by using a biological probe to index tendencies to engage in reward-based eating. She is currently using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methodologies to assess the efficacy of targeted interventions that (1) increase awareness and understanding of food craving experiences, and (2) de-couple the experience of craving from the action of indulging cravings.

She is also interested in better understanding the psychosocial needs of individuals who are caregivers for a loved one. These individuals are at increased risk for physical and psychological health problems and are a growing sector of the US population. In addition to exploratory work, she is also in developing highly disseminable, light-touch interventions that improve quality of life of these individuals.

She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Arizona where she developed two lines of research with Dr. David Sbarra. In one line of work, she studied predictors and correlates of psychological adjustment and physical health following romantic relationship dissolutions (namely, divorce). In a second line of work, she studied interpersonal perceptions of psychological distress in the contexts of post-divorce recovery and social evaluative threat. She completed a Behavioral Medicine Clinical Internship at the VA Palo Alto Medical Health Care System. She then completed a T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Training in Research in Integrative Medicine (TRIM) program at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine in the Fall of 2013, before joining UCSF as Faculty.