The National Institute for Integrative Healthcare encourages the development of therapies that affect individuals epigenetically by awarding an annual monetary award to recognize practical applications of epigenetics. Such applications can be psychological (e.g. Energy Psychology interventions), social (e.g. childhood nurturing, which enhances the expression of the genes in the hippocampus that dampen stress), or biomedical. The inaugural recipient was Randy Jirtle, PhD, of Duke University Medical Center, for his pioneering work discovering the epigenetic effects of Agouti gene suppression.