Dr. Inger Burnett-Zeigler is a licensed clinical psychologist and associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. She has two decades of clinical experience helping people with stress, trauma, mood and anxiety conditions, and difficulty in interpersonal relationships. In her clinical practice she promotes holistic wellness through mindfulness, self-compassion and healthy behavior change. Inger’s scholarly work focuses on the role that social determinants of health play in mental illness and treatment, particularly in the Black community. She is the author of the book Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen: The Emotional Lives of Black Women. She has written dozens of articles and other publications on mental health in the Black community and lectures widely on barriers to access and engagement in mental health treatment, mindfulness and strategies to improve mental health outcomes and participation in treatment. Inger is an advocate for normalizing participation in mental health treatment and ensuring that all individuals have access to high-quality, evidence-based mental health care. She is an active contributor to the public discourse on mental health and she has been featured in the New York Times, TIME Magazine, and Chicago Tribune. Inger received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Cornell University, her doctorate in clinical psychology from Northwestern University, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the VA Ann Arbor/University of Michigan. She lives in Chicago.
Dr. Kedrick B. Perry is the Vice President for Equity and Inclusion in the Office of Equity and Inclusion at Loyola University New Orleans where he provides strategic guidance and serves as a thought leader and partner supporting all campus constituencies in achieving inclusive excellence throughout the institution. Before Loyola, Dr. Perry was head of diversity and outreach in the National Science Foundation’s Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science and executive director of the Grand Challenges Scholars Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he was director of the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program at Suffolk University in Boston, where he prepared underrepresented, first-generation, and limited-income undergraduate students for graduate study. Prior to that position, he worked in the Office of Graduate Student Diversity Programs at the University of Virginia where he was committed to the recruitment, retention, mentoring, and graduation of a highly talented and diverse graduate student population. He received his doctorate in higher education from the University of Virginia where he studied the effects of mentoring on underrepresented students. Dr. Perry also holds a Master of Public Administration and a graduate certificate in nonprofit management from North Carolina State University and a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Lionel is a PhD student in the Cognitive Modeling research group at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and received my master’s degree in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Amsterdam. His research contributes to the recent shift in social neuroscience away from investigating
single, isolated brains, and instead exploring brain, behavior, and society as an integrated system. He focuses on studying the role of top-down cognitive mechanisms on our ability to take perspectives with others in a way that allows us to develop a shared understanding of goals, beliefs, and social actions.
Shin-Young Kim is a 2nd year clinical psychology Ph.D. student at the University of Rochester under the mentorship of Dr. Ron Rogge. She is interested in the mechanisms underlying mind-body interactions, particularly regarding contemplative meditations and interoceptive disturbances in emotional disorders. After receiving her master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from Sogang University, she received a Fulbright to continue her studies in the United States. Based on her past experience working as a researcher in the psychiatric departments of Korean hospitals, she plans to explore the role of cultural factors to address mental health disparities in Asian countries.
I am a Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University where I direct the Affective & Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory. My research program uses the tools of human neuroscience to study how the brain creates emotion and how these brain systems are implicated in health and well-being. I also study how stress affects the emotional brain, and bidirectional signaling between the brain and the immune system in generating risk and resilience for mental and physical health problems. More recently, I have begun examining the effect of intervention programs – including meditation – on neuroimmune signaling, and the potential of these programs to protect the developing brain from stress and adversity. I am very interested in the confluence between science and Buddhism, and am currently serving as Co-Director of Research Training for the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI). This initiative aims to foster collaborations between academic scientists and Tibetan Buddhist monastics and to train monastic scientists in methods for studying the human brain, including EEG and both functional and structural brain imaging.
Dr. Sara Konrath directs the Interdisciplinary Program for Empathy and Altruism Research (iPEAR). Her research tracks changes over time in empathy and related traits in American young adults, and examines potential implications of digital technology for empathy. She has developed digital empathy-building tools for youth (Text to Connect; Random App of Kindness), and has created other empathy-training programs for other groups (e.g., teachers, physicians, museums, nonprofits). Konrath has published dozens of papers in top scientific journals, writes a popular Psychology Today blog, and her research has been featured in national and international media. She is an Associate Professor at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
Dr. Emily Weinstein is a longtime senior researcher (and soon-to-be Project Director) at Project Zero and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. At Project Zero, she leads a suite of projects keyed to studying young people’s digital lives and re-imagining digital well-being. Dr. Weinstein has spent over a decade chasing answers to questions about what it’s like to grow up with smartphones and social media. She also has a longtime commitment to directly supporting schools and families, including through her work with Common Sense on digital citizenship.
Polina is a PhD Candidate in Social Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, working with Dr. Kirk Warren Brown at the Wellbeing Lab. Originally from Russia, she served as Research Assistant at the Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation Lab (Moscow, Russia), VIA institute on Character (Cincinnati, Ohio), and Decision Neuroscience Lab (Richmond, Virginia). Polina’s research interests lie in the intersection of contemplative science and positive psychology, with a special focus on how mindfulness practice affects our social and emotional well-being. In her free time, Polina enjoys reading and taking walks around Richmond.
Erika Díaz-Almeyda is an Assistant Professor of Biology at California State University, San Marcos, where she leads her microbial ecology lab investigating relationships between microbes and their hosts, with a focus on restoration and agricultural applications. Her pedagogy actively integrates innovative teaching strategies and emphasizes working with undergraduate students as research collaborators. Her current research explores how agroecological systems impact soil microbial diversity and function. She emphasizes traditional ecological practices, integrating local stakeholder perspectives and collaborating with local communities to determine research priorities and support decision-making. She completed her Ph.D. in Biology at The Pennsylvania State University and was an NIH-FIRST fellow at Emory University. She is currently a Sci Comm Identities Project fellow (Metcalf Institute), where she focuses on the intersection of climate change and food-related issues, including food insecurity, and agriculture. She is also a Faculty Innovation Fellow at CSUSM (2024–2025), where she is developing the Milpa HUB—a research garden where she grows milpa and conducts experiments, sharing methods and celebrations related to milpa cultivation. The goal is to expand community access to this ancestral technology while connecting individuals already engaged in milpa-related work, including seed farmers and chefs.
