Executive Director | Integrative Health Institute
Bruce Cryer has spent the past forty years researching and teaching innovative approaches to maximizing health, resilience and human performance. He was named president and CEO of HeartMath LLC in 2000, having helped launch the non-profit HeartMath Institute with founder Doc Childre in 1991. For eight years prior, he served as vice president for a biotech company specializing in nutritional approaches to health and well-being. Bruce was the key architect of programs that incorporate HeartMath’s innovative biomedical research into practical tools and strategies to enhance health, performance, creativity, innovation, and productivity for both the individual and the organization. He successfully guided HeartMath programs at organizations such as Mayo Clinic, Duke University Health System, Stanford School of Medicine, UCSF’s Center for the Health Professions, and dozens of corporations, health systems and government agencies across the US. He has worked extensively with both clinical and administrative leaders throughout the US and within the NHS in both Scotland and England. He has led retreats for health professionals in Italy, and has been a regular speaker at the American Congress of Healthcare Executives for the past decade, as well as Health Forum’s Leadership Summit and Rural Healthcare Leadership conference.
Cryer is co-author of “From Chaos to Coherence: The Power to Change Performance.” Cryer is also lead author of the Harvard Business Review article (July 2003; republished 2015), entitled “Pull the Plug on Stress.” He is also co-author of “An Inner Quality Approach to Reducing Stress and Improving Physical and Emotional Wellbeing at Work,” published in the journal Stress Medicine.
Since 1997, Cryer has been adjunct faculty at Stanford Business School’s Executive Program. Since 2008, he has taught HeartMath’s stress/resilience program for Stanford’s employee wellness program. He has been on the Board of the Friends of the National Library of Medicine (part of NIH), a member of the Adaptive Business Leaders Health Care Roundtable, has been a featured speaker across the US in the Lessons in Leadership Distinguished Speakers Series, and has been on the faculty of the Global Institute for Leadership Development. He has also lectured at the Institute for Health and Productivity Management (IHPM), the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association, the Stanford Sloan Program, the Stanford Executive Briefings series, Columbia Senior Executive Program, University of California Berkeley Haas Business School, the Santa Clara University Leavey School of Business, the Nanyang Polytechnic University School of Business Management in Singapore, and the International Center for Leadership in Finance, based in Kuala Lumpur.
A two year health crisis became a healing journey which convinced him to focus his energies and passions on personal healing, creative expression and global health. Cryer is now 12 years cancer-free and 11 years MRSA free. A recent test revealed Cryer’s biological age as 36, more than 30 years younger than his chronological age. Cryer released an album of original songs in 2018 called Renaissance Human.
After a longer career working in the holistic and integrative health fields, Cryer became President of The Graduate Institute for Holistic Studies (TGI) in June 2020. TGI’s curriculum was acquired in 2022 by Salem University. He is now Executive Director of the Integrative Health Institute at Salem University.