Our People
Jeffrey Bland, PhD
Chair Emeritus, IFM Board of Directors
Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, CNS, is an internationally recognized leader in the nutritional medicine field. He co-founded The Institute for Functional Medicine in 1991 and is known to many as the “father of Functional Medicine.” Over the past 35 years, Dr. Bland has traveled more than six million miles teaching more than 100,000 healthcare practitioners in the US, Canada, and 50 other countries about Functional Medicine.
A biochemist by training, Dr. Bland is a fellow of the both the American College of Nutrition, where he is a certified nutrition specialist, and the Association for Clinical Biochemistry. Dr. Bland served as director of nutritional research at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in the early 1980’s, working directly with two-time Nobel Laureate Dr. Linus Pauling, whom he considers his lifelong mentor. Dr. Bland has authored several books about nutritional medicine, both for the healthcare professional and for the general public, and he is also the principal author of over 120 peer-reviewed research papers on nutritional biochemistry and medicine. Dr. Bland has self-published a monthly audio journal, Functional Medicine Update, for more than 30 years that is distributed to healthcare practitioners in 36 countries.
Dr. Bland was the founder and chief executive officer of HealthComm International, a global company that became a leader in the development of medical foods; chief science officer of Metagenics, Inc.; and president of MetaProteomics, where he led a research team of more than 100 scientists in studying metabolic factors associated with chronic diseases. In 2012, Dr. Bland founded the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute (PLMI), a nonprofit organization based in Seattle, Washington, where he continues to serve as president. He is also president and CEO of KinDex Therapeutics, which researches molecules associated with genetic expression patterns in chronic diseases.