Jyoti “Tina” Savla, PhD, is the Director of the Whole Health Consortium at Virginia Tech and Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science. She also serves as a Research Methodologist in the Center for Gerontology and holds a secondary appointment as Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. Through the Whole Health Consortium, Dr. Savla brings together researchers, clinicians, and community leaders to accelerate Whole Health research and implementation. The consortium fosters collaboration across disciplines and sectors, aligning research with local and regional priorities through seed funding, data sharing, and learning networks. These efforts build the evidence base and infrastructure needed to translate Whole Health research into practice and policy across Virginia and beyond.
As a social gerontologist and quantitative methodologist, Dr. Savla’s scholarship underpins a systems perspective. Her research examines how families and communities adapt to the daily demands of chronic illness and long-term care, with emphasis on caregiving networks, biobehavioral stress responses, and social determinants of health. She combines participatory design with rigorous analytical methods to ensure that research produces real-world, sustainable models of care. Dr. Savla leads a robust portfolio of federally funded research on family caregiving, daily stress processes, and health disparities. She serves as a Multiple Principal Investigator on two National Institute on Aging studies examining home and community-based service use, family support, and daily stress reactivity among dementia caregivers, and as a Co-Investigator on two Department of Defense clinical trials testing mindfulness-based psychoeducational interventions for dementia caregivers. She also collaborates on NIH projects in nutrition, metabolic health, and stress physiology, applying behavioral and biobehavioral methods to advance interdisciplinary studies of health and well-being. Her work appears in leading gerontology and behavioral science journals, and she contributes to national discussions on rural health transformation, caregiving policy, and care team well-being.
Dr. Savla is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and was appointed by the Governor to the Commonwealth Council on Aging in Virginia. Dr. Savla earned her PhD in Child and Family Development from the University of Georgia and completed a NIMH postdoctoral fellowship in Mental Health and Aging at The Pennsylvania State University.