Te Martin (they/them) is a song-keeper and ritual artist based on Southern Pomo, Graton Rancheria, and Me-Wuk land in sebastopol, california. They facilitate oral tradition singing classes and workshops that focus on song as a tool for collective liberation, somatic regulation, and ancestral connection. Te holds a B.A. in Theology from St. Louis University, is a student of Gaelic song, and released their first professional music video and EP of original songs, “Water & Bones”, in 2021.
Dr. Alea Skwara is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Dr. Cliff Saron’s research group at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain. She completed her PhD in Psychology, specializing in Cognitive Neuroscience, with Dr. Saron in 2021. Her research explores the neurocognitive bases of compassion and responses to suffering to better understand how we can cultivate our ability to be with suffering in adaptive ways.
To this end, Alea’s work brings together a variety of methodological approaches–including brain electrophysiology, peripheral nervous system activity, eyetracking, and self-report and behavioral measures–to better understand how individuals respond to suffering, and how meditation training may relate to the development of compassion for oneself and for others.
She is particularly interested in how scientific research on compassion can be applied in real-world contexts and policy-making to build a more just and thriving society, with immigration justice as a core area of personal priority. This includes a collaboration with Prof. Raquel Aldana at UC Davis School of Law that brings together legal and mental health academic faculty, and clinical practitioners working with immigrants and trauma to bridge the legal/scientific gap in immigration cases.
As a whole, Alea’s goal is to contribute to our collective understanding of the psychological and societal factors that support compassionate responses to suffering, and how these may be applied to build a more just and equitable world.
Dr. Pittman is an Associate Professor in the American Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Washington (UW). She received her Ph.D. in Sociology at Northwestern University. Before coming to the UW, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University. In 2011, she completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Research and Training Program on Poverty and Public Policy at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Dr. Pittman is currently focused on three distinct, but interrelated aspects of grandparent caregiving. Her forthcoming book, Grandmothering While Black: A Twenty-First Century Story of Love, Coercion and Survival will be published with the University of California Press (May 2023). She was awarded a Simpson Center Society of Scholars Fellowship, Royalty Research Fund, and a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship for junior faculty to complete her second book manuscript, tentatively titled I’m Not Going to Always Be Here: Black Grandmothering from Slavery through the Great Migration. Her scholarship has been published in numerous peer-reviewed academic journals and edited volumes. She is also working on a project that examines and intervenes on the health disparities experienced by grandparent caregivers and uses social and biomedical science approaches. Several institutions have funded Dr. Pittman’s work, including the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Northwestern University, Hiram College, and the UW.
Broadly, Dr. Pittman’s research examines the coping experiences of socially marginalized women. Her other research interests include social stratification and inequality; urban poverty; race and ethnicity; gender and families; research methods; public policy; and health disparities.
Inspired by the work of the South African Scholar Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Mays Imad is interested in studying the notion of “reparative humanism,” and what it means to become a flourishing human being and to contribute to intergenerational wellbeing. Mays focuses that question on her work within the academy working with students and colleagues to understand how trauma, including intergenerational trauma, shows up within postsecondary education.
Specifically she asks: When we are confronted with intersecting crises, how do institutions balance their mission of education with the fact that many of their students and employees are experiencing chronic, if not traumatic, levels of stress and burnout? Why is it imperative not to ignore the shadow of trauma and to leverage the power of meaningful relationships to create conditions for healing, learning and transformation.
Within that overarching theme, Mays investigates the following questions: 1) How to use what we know about the neurobiology of learning to optimize conditions for learning for all students? 2) How to create structural immunity that helps cultivate equitable and healthy ecosystems? 3) How to use our positionality to advocate for readily accessible and culturally-grounded mental health support for all students?
Learn more about her work here
Anu Gupta is a human rights lawyer, social scientist, educator, and the Founder of BE MORE with Anu. He is also a gay immigrant man of color with lived experiences of bias and bullying that almost led him to take his life. But he didn’t. Instead, he dedicated himself to find solutions to bias through two decades of original research, fieldwork with diverse communities globally, and 10,000 hours of meditation practice.
A peer-reviewed author and the principal investigator behind BE MORE’s research, he secured highly competitive grants from institutions like the National Science Foundation, NYS Health Foundation, American Heart Association, among others, to validate BE MORE’s science-backed, meditation-driven method to break bias. He has written and spoken extensively, including on the TED stage, the Oprah Conversation, Fast Company, and Newsweek.
Anu worked as an attorney, a research scientist, and a teacher in the United States, Europe, and Asia, prior to founding BE MORE. He is a trained meditation and yoga teacher (500-hours) and is a living testament of the power of these ancient sciences to transform inner and external turmoil. His meditations can be found on the Insight Timer, Open, and the Ten Percent Happier meditation apps.
Anu obtained his JD from NYU Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar, an MPhil in Development Studies from Cambridge University, and a BA (summa cum laude) in Int’l Relations, Islamic Studies & Chemistry from NYU. He also serves as a Systems Designer for Dickinson Law’s Antiracist Development Institute (ADI). He has served as a Board Member for the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (BCBS) and The Middle Collegiate Church’s Middle Project.
Follow @bemorewithanu or learn more at bemorewithanu.com.
Cortland is a scientist, translator, and meditation teacher. His eclectic background includes eight years spent living in Tibetan refugee settlements in India and Nepal and cutting-edge research at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Meditator’s Guide to Buddhism, the Dharma Lab Substack and the forthcoming Born to Flourish, both with Dr. Richard Davidson. He is also the creator of the award-winning Healthy Minds Program, a freely available mobile app, and has published numerous scientific articles, released twelve books of translations of ancient Tibetan meditation manuals, and is the cofounder of Tergar International, which oversees a global network of meditation groups and centers.
Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D. is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT; the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School; and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).
He received his B.A. in Applied Mathematics (magna cum laude) from Harvard College, his M.A. and Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University and his M.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Medical School. Professor Brown completed his internship in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and his anesthesiology residency at MGH.
Professor Brown is an anesthesiologist-statistician whose research is defining the neuroscience of how anesthetics produce the states of general anesthesia. He also develops statistical methods for neuroscience data analysis.
Professor Brown is a fellow of the IEEE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering.
Professor Brown has received an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, the Sacks Prize from the National Institute of Statistical Science, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Applied Mathematics, the American Society of Anesthesiologists Excellence in Research Award, the Dickson Prize in Science, the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience, the Pierre Galletti Award, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, and a Doctor of Science Honoris Causa from the University of Southern California.
he/him – Rui Afonso is a Brazilian researcher interested in the effects of contemplative practices and altered states of consciousness (self-induced and substance-induced) on mental health. His background is in psychobiology and neuroscience. For decades he has been a teacher and practitioner of Yoga and meditation.
My Ngoc has a background in neuroscience from Harvard University and clinical social work from Simmons University. She has taught mindfulness for over five years in community, healthcare, university, and virtual settings, as well as in English and Vietnamese. Complementing this are several years of coordinating a federally-funded research study on incorporating mindfulness into healthcare and extensive experience working with immigrants and refugees in healthcare and crisis centers. Currently a second year PhD student in Social Work at the University of Denver, her work focuses on expanding mindfulness research into culturally and linguistically diverse populations and for community healing.
