Harold Roth

Harold D. Roth is Professor of Religious Studies and the Director of the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University. Roth is a specialist in Classical Chinese Religious Thought, Classical Daoism, the comparative study of contemplative practices and experiences and a pioneer of the academic field of Contemplative Studies. Roth is the founder and director of …

Amishi Jha

Amishi Jha is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami, and Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, prior to which she was an Assistant Professor at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from the University of California–Davis, and received her …

Laura Rendón

Laura I. Rendón, PhD,  is a renowned advocate, scholar, and educator. As a speaker with SpeakOut-The Institute for Democratic Education and Culture, she has addressed audiences worldwide on education and social justice. Raised in a low-income, single-parent home on the U.S.-Mexico Border, Rendón is a dedicated champion for low-income, first-generation students. She authored Sentipensante Pedagogy …

Zindel Segal

Zindel Segal, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Psychology in Mood Disorders at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a senior scientist in the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. He pioneered the use of mindfulness meditation for promoting wellness in the area of mood disorders. He is …

Andreas Roepstorff

Andreas Roepstorff, Ph.D. is Professor, Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience and Department of Social Anthropology, Aarhus University / Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark. As an anthropologist in neuroscience, Andreas tries to maintain a dual perspective. He studies the workings of the brain, particularly at the levels of consciousness, cognition and communication. He is equally interested in …

Catherine Kerr

Catherine Kerr, PhD was director of translational neuroscience at the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University. Her neuroscience research focused on neural dynamics underlying embodied attention and the sense of touch. Her team was the first to publish results showing how embodied attention changes cortical rhythms in the “touch cortex” (primary somatosensory cortex) and how …

Tania Singer

Tania Singer is a professor of social neuroscience and psychology and heads the Max Planck Society’s Social Neuroscience Lab in Berlin, Germany. After her PhD in psychology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development in 2000, she worked at the Wellcome Centre for Imaging Neuroscience, at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London, and held the …

Evan Thompson

Evan Thompson is a writer and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he is also an Associate Member of the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Psychology (Cognitive Science). He works on the nature of the mind, the self, and human experience. His work combines cognitive science, philosophy of …

Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta

Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta is Professor of Psychology and the Director of Faculty Equity and Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Her research is on implicit bias. Whereas past work had assumed that implicit bias is learned early in life and difficult to change, her research shows that such bias can be changed given the right …

Helen Weng

Helen Y. Weng, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, and her research focuses on the neural mechanisms of how meditation practices may improve social behavior and mental health. Her current work involves adapting research methodology to increase diverse representation in the neuroscience of meditation from a social justice perspective. This includes using community engagement …