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 mindfulness is associated with enhanced modulation of these embodied attentional rhythms. In addition to these neurophysiological studies, she drew on her background as a qualitative researcher and investigator of placebo effects to pioneer methods for linking quantitative, neural studies with qualitative studies of patient experience. Her last research project focused on isolating neurophysiological, immunological and experiential mechanisms underlying cancer survivors’ reports of “energy” and vitality in contemplative practice.

Cathy Kerr passed away in 2016. Her sister, Sarah Kerr, wrote this obituary.

The Mind & Life Catherine Kerr Award for Courageous and Compassionate Science was established in 2016 in her memory.

Martijn van Beek, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and based at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University in Denmark. He lived and worked among Tibetan Buddhist communities for extended periods since the early 1980s, particularly in Ladakh. His earlier research examined the nexus between development, religious identification, and the dynamics of communal conflict. For the past several years, his research has focused on contemplative practices, lineages, and communities in the contemporary world, in the West as well as in Asia. He has a particular academic as well as personal interest in the refiguring of contemplative life in the context of normative secularism and the scientific worldview. Together with colleagues in the cognitive and health sciences, he has been involved in (neuro-) scientific research on contemplative practices and their effects and is particularly interested in the methodological and conceptual challenges of experimental and experiential research on contemplative practices and contemplative life. He collaborates closely with colleagues from a number of disciplines to explore the potential of “microphenomenological” elicitation interviews for contemplative research, teaching, and practice. Together with other members of the Danish Society for the Promotion of Life Wisdom in Children, he is also involved in research and practice in contemplative education, including through the teacher training programme Training Empathy, to help school teachers facilitate the unfolding of children’s innate potential for presence and empathy. He is affiliated with Vaekstcenteret, a contemplative community in Denmark.

Carol Worthman is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University (Atlanta), where she also directs the Laboratory for Comparative Human Biology. After taking a dual undergraduate degree in biology and botany at Pomona College, Dr. Worthman took her PhD in biological anthropology at Harvard University, having also studied endocrinology at UCSD and neuroscience at MIT under Jack Geller and Richard Wurtman, respectively. She joined the nascent anthropology faculty at Emory University in 1986, and established a laboratory pioneering the use of biomarkers in population research. Professor Worthman takes a biocultural approach to pursuit of comparative interdisciplinary research on human development, and biocultural bases of differential mental and physical health. She has conducted cross-cultural biosocial research in thirteen countries, as well as in rural, urban, and semi-urban areas of the United States. For over 20 years, she collaborated in the Great Smoky Mountains Study, a large, longitudinal, population-based developmental epidemiological project in western North Carolina. She has led development and implementation of the neuroscience component in the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative since its inception in 2008.

Carol Worthman served on the Mind & Life Steering Council from Spring 2016 to Spring 2019.

Wendy J. Weber, ND, PhD, MPH, joined NCCIH as a program director in 2009. She oversees NCCIH’s portfolio of health services research, studies of complementary medicine to promote of healthy behavior, and complex complementary/integrative medicine intervention research to include traditional Chinese medicine, naturopathy, integrative medicine and Ayurveda. Dr. Weber’s interests include the use of complementary medicine interventions for common pediatric conditions, mental health conditions, promoting healthy behaviors, and health services research. Dr. Weber is the coordinator for NCCIH’s Preliminary Clinical Studies in Preparation for Large Interventional Trials of Complementary and Alternative Medicine Therapies (R34) program. She is also the NCCIH representative to the NIH Common Fund Science of Behavior Change program and the NIH Prevention Research Coordinating Committee. Dr. Weber earned a Doctorate of Philosophy in epidemiology and a Master of Public Health from the University of Washington. She earned a Doctorate of Naturopathic Medicine (N.D.) from Bastyr University. Prior to joining NCCIH, she was a research associate professor at Bastyr University, where her research included the study of herbal treatments for pediatric conditions.

Hanne De Jaegher (DPhil, 2007, University of Sussex) is a philosopher of cognitive science fascinated by how we think, work, play—basically, live and love—together. She developed the theory of intersubjectivity called participatory sense-making. Grounded in enactive cognitive science, dynamical systems theory, and phenomenology, this theory is applied across various academic and applied disciplines. Her latest project is to write an engaged—even engaging—epistemology, which understands knowing as based in the ongoing existential tensions of loving.

I am interested in the plasticity of human consciousness. My research investigates practices that aim to transform subjective experience—from meditation and hypnosis to placebos, prayer, and contemplative therapies. I work from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining cognitive, neurobiological, and phenomenological approaches to shed light on mechanisms of self-regulation in both health and pathology.
I completed my PhD in neuroscience at McGill University and am currently working with Tanya M. Luhrmann as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. My work has been supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Bial Foundation, and the Mind & Life Institute. Before my doctorate, I completed a master’s in neuroscience and an undergraduate with honours in psychology and minors in philosophy and world religions, all at McGill.

William Waldron teaches courses on the South Asian religious traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, Tibetan religion and history, comparative psychologies and philosophies of mind, and theory and method in the study of religion. His publications focus on the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism and its dialogue with modern thought. Professor Waldron has been at Middlebury College since 1996. His monograph, The Buddhist Unconscious: The Alaya-vijñana in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought, was published by RoutledgeCurzon in 2003. He is currently working on an introduction to Yogacara cognitive theory in relation to cognitive science.

An internationally-sought-after mindfulness teacher and keynote speaker, and a thought and practice innovator of mindfulness-based social justice principles, concepts and practices, Rhonda V. Magee, M.A., J.D., is Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco.

Rhonda has spent more than 20 years integrating mindfulness into higher education, leadership, and everyday social engagement. Her work explores the intersections of anti-racist education, social justice, and contemplative practices, and offering trauma-sensitive practices to support healing, resilience, personal wellbeing, and flourishing together. Grounded in the science of mindfulness, wellbeing, and resilience, she integrates storytelling, movement, journaling, and other research-based experiential practices for strengthening our inner resources for navigating a world of constant change.

In recognition of her uniquely innovative impact on the field of mindfulness and wellbeing in law, Rhonda was the inaugural recipient of the Reed Smith Excellence in Wellbeing in Law Award (2022), awarded after an independent, national selection process by the Institute for Wellbeing in Law. A Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, she is an international keynote speaker and mindfulness teacher trainer with a particular emphasis on integrating mindfulness into everyday life in the face of the most vexing challenges of our times. She is a student of a range of Buddhist traditions and mindfulness masters, and is a lay teacher in the Peacemaker Order led by Upaya Zen Center founder Roshi Joan Halifax. She has served as an advisor to a range of leading mindfulness-based professional development organizations, including the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness, the Brown Mindfulness Center, the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, and the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. 

Rhonda Magee was named one of Mindful Magazine’s Inaugural Twelve Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement in 2019. Rhonda’s award-winning book, The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness (Penguin RandomHouse TarcherPerigee: 2019; paperback edition 2021), was named one of the top ten books released for the year by the Greater Good Science Center, and received similar recognition by Psychology Today and the editors of Mindful.org. To learn more visit RhondaVMagee.com. 

Rhonda Magee served on the Mind & Life Steering Council from Spring 2016 to Spring 2018.

After graduating from the University of California–Berkeley in mathematics and cognitive science, Peter Grossenbacher’s doctorate at the University of Oregon in experimental psychology focused on human electrophysiology and attention. His book, “Finding Consciousness in the Brain: A Neurocognitive Approach,” offers insights into the brain’s involvement in conscious experience. After researching multisensory attention and synesthesia at the University of Cambridge and the National Institute of Mental Health, he joined the Naropa faculty in 2000. A meditator
since 1980, his research focuses on information processing during meditation, meditative development and contemplative teaching. He trains scientists and educational professionals across a variety of settings in mindfulness-based pedagogies that support awareness, facilitate inclusion and foster community.

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 inaugural Chair of Social Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics at the University of Zürich. She is a world expert on compassion and empathy, and has a passion for creating bridges between fields that typically never interact. Her research focus is on the hormonal, neuronal, and developmental basis of human sociality, empathy, and compassion, and their malleability through mental training. She has initiated and headed one of the largest meditation-based secular mental training studies on compassion, the ReSource project. Linking such findings to the field of (neuro)economics, she developed a Caring Economics approach, developing new models of economy based on care and social cohesion. She is also heading the CovSocial project, a large-scale study on stress, resilience and social cohesion in Berliners during the corona crisis. Presently, she works on the Edu:Social project aiming at bringing partner-based mental training formats, so-called Dyads, into education and health-care settings to boost resilience and social competencies. Tania Singer is the author of more than 160 scientific articles (e.g., Science, Nature) and book chapters and edited together with Matthieu Ricard the two books Caring Economics (2015) and Power and Care (2019), based on two Mind and Life conferences with His Holiness the Dalai Lama she helped organize. She served on the Mind & Life Board of Directors from 2012 to 2018 and was co-founder of Mind and Life Europe. Throughout her life she has explored how inner change can bring about societal change putting science in the service of societal transformation.

Tania Singer served on the Mind & Life Board of Directors from 2012 to 2018.