John Edwards is Psychology Professor and Associate Dean at Oregon State University. He is co-founder and Director of Oregon State University’s Contemplative Studies Initiative, which has been in existence since 2008. In this role, he has organized and led many meditation-related events. His training is in Social/Personality psychology, with research interests in the broad areas of social cognition and attribution. His broad interests are in the ways in which personality and motivation impact social information processing with a particular focus on effects of uncertainty and control motivation on human functioning. He has done a great deal of work on causal uncertainty, which are feelings of uncertainty that one understands the causes of events. He has been increasingly focused on intersections between Buddhist philosophy and scientific theories of social cognition, and on the mechanisms by which different meditation types affect people. He has had funding from the National Science Foundation and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, among other sources. He is a Fellow of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.
