Noopur Amin is deeply interested in empathy and compassion, both as a guidepost for her personal daily life, and as a calling to uncover its neural basis as a neuroscientist. She is currently a postdoc at UC Berkeley in Dr. Daniela Kaufer’s lab, where she is studying the neural basis of empathy and prosocial behaviors in rodent models using an integrative approach and applying molecular, physiological, and behavioral techniques. Her current research projects include: 1) investigating the hormonal basis and neural circuits mediating helping behavior; and 2) studying early life stress-induced alterations in neurogenesis, cell proliferation and migration. For her graduate career, she obtained a Ph.D. in the Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley in Dr. Frederic Theunissen’s computational and auditory physiology songbird lab. There she used in vivo neurophysiological recordings and systems-level analyses to investigate the processing of complex natural sounds and the roles of development and patterned acoustic experience on shaping high-level auditory neural responses.

Yuval Hadash is a Psychologist and Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology working with Prof. Amit Bernstein in the International Research Collaborative on Anxiety (IRCA) laboratory at the University of Haifa, Israel. He conducted my undergraduate studies in psychology and humanities at the University of Haifa. He received training in mindfulness-based interventions, cognitive-behavioral therapies and psychodynamic therapy. His research interests are focused on understanding core processes in mindfulness and its mechanisms of action. He is specifically interested in integrating Buddhist conceptions of mindfulness, self-referentiality and equanimity into scientific conceptualizations and investigations of mindfulness processes and mechanisms. Accordingly, he is currently working on research projects investigating novel implicit and behavioral measurements of these processes, and testing their relations to well being, maladaptation and psychopathology.

Sucharit Katyal is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He is broadly interested in understanding how the mind becomes aware. His research so far has focused on using state-of-the-art EEG and fMRI techniques to study visual attention and awareness. He has looked at subcortical networks of attention using high-resolution fMRI, neural signals underlying binocular rivalry using visual adaptation and SSVEP, and is currently undertaking a big data project to understand the neural bases for individual differences in bistable perception using EEG.

Brianna earned an M.A. in Psychological and Brain Sciences with additional coursework in Religious Studies and Philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara in June 2016 after having obtained a B.A. in Neuroscience, Psychology, and Chinese from Macalester College in 2013. Combining phenomenological and experimental methods with perspectives from both the humanities and social sciences, she researches “ego death” or selfless, non-dual experiences, particularly how meditation and other Buddhist practices contribute to the transformation of the “ego” or sense of “self,” as well as how these changes manifest as pro-social and pro-environmental behavior. Throughout summer 2016, Brianna will serve as an Assistant Specialist through the Department of Religious Studies at UCSB, conducting research through the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center with the support of Mind and Life’s Varela Award at a Humanistic Buddhist monastery in Taiwan.

Jessica Peters is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Child Mental Health T32 at Rhode Island Hospital and the Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where she works with Dr. Shirley Yen. She obtained her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Kentucky, where she was mentored by Dr. Ruth Baer. As a doctoral student, she studied mindfulness as well as mechanisms of psychopathology potentially targeted by mindfulness-based interventions, such as rumination and impulsivity, in the context of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and substance use disorders. Her dissertation utilized neuroimaging to examine the function of anger rumination in BPD. She has published on assessment of mindfulness and the particular importance of nonjudgmental orientation to experience, especially in regard to prevention of psychopathology and looks forward to furthering that line of work with the Varela Award.

This project in alternative secular epistemologies is rooted in several months of intensive research and writing completed as a Mind & Life visiting scholar in Amherst in 2015, as well as intellectual encounters as a presenter at ISCS 2014 and research fellow at MLSRI 2015. William Rubel is a current PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, writing on science, sensation, and the history of feeling in romantic poetry. After receiving a BA, summa cum laude, from Columbia University, he completed a master’s thesis on embodied mind, drawing on contemplative neuroscience (Varela, Damasio, Thompson, Davidson). His interests include process philosophy, political ecology, science studies, haptic aesthetics, nonwestern epistemologies, and ecologies of affect. He is excited to build bridges between speculative metaphysics and buddhist epistemology with Gen. Lobsang Nor- bu Shastri at the Central University of Tibetan Studies later this year.