David M. Fresco, PhD, is Professor of Psychological Sciences at Kent State University and Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He directs the Psychopathology and Emotion Regulation Laboratory (PERL) and is a co-director of the Kent Electrophysiological Neuroimaging Laboratory (KENL). He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Temple University. His program of research adopts an affective science perspective to the study of anxiety and mood disorders. Working at the interface of cognitive behavioral and emotion regulation approaches, he conducts survey, experimental, and treatment research to examine factors associated with major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) including metacognitive factors (e.g., explanatory flexibility, decentering, rumination, worry), peripheral psychophysiology, and emerging work from affective neuroscience, utilizing neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques. Another focus of the PERL lab is the development of treatments informed by affective and contemplative neuroscience findings that incorporate mindfulness meditation and other
practices derived from Buddhist mental training exercises. Much of his NIH-funded treatment research has focused on the infusion of mindfulness into Western psychosocial treatments.
Bronwyn Finnigan, PhD, is a continuing lecturer and Deputy Head of the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University (ANU). She works in philosophy of action, ethics, and epistemology in Western and Asian philosophical traditions. Her current research focuses on the nature and function of rationality (and related notions of intentionality, subjectivity and normativity) in agency and ethical agency. She is particularly interested in skilled action and non-deliberative or unreflective modes of ethical agency. Bronwyn has a BA (University of Melbourne), MA (University of Sydney) in philosophy and completed her PhD (University of Auckland) in 2012 with Rosalind Hursthouse and John Bishop. She has studied Indian and Tibetan Buddhist thought in India, Nepal, USA, Switzerland and Japan. She co-authored Moonshadows: Conventional Truth and Buddhist Philosophy (Cowherds, Oxford University Press, 2011), which focuses on issues of metaphysics, theories of truth, justification and ethics in Madhyamaka Buddhism. She has published articles on the nature of action and ethical agency that emerge from recent engagements with Indian Pramānāvāda, Classical Chinese Confucianism and Daoism; on meta-ethical problems that arise when Buddhist ethics is contextualized in Pramānāvāda epistemology and a forthcoming article that investigates moral justification in the context of Prāsangika Madhyamaka. She has also co-authored a book chapter on spontaneous action in martial arts, which engaged the Japanese Zen Buddhist views of Takuan.
