Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Cultural, Medical and Psychological Anthropology at Emory University. She received her D. Phil. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Oxford University in 2001. Following that, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard’s Department of Social Medicine, and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. She is a recipient of an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Fellowship and a Mind and Life Contemplative Studies Fellowship. Her research focuses on cross-cultural understandings of health and illness, especially mental well-being, and her work brings Western and Asian (particularly Japanese and Tibetan) perspectives on the mind-body, contemplative practices, religion, and therapy into dialogue. Her recent research has examined the Japanese contemplative practice of Naikan, secularized contemplative practices in the US, Tibetan medicine, loneliness and suicide. Her publications include one monograph, Psychotherapy and Religion in Japan: The Japanese Introspection Practice of Naikan (Routledge, 2006), and several published journal articles and book chapters both in English and Japanese.
