Christine Lathren, MD, MSPH, is a research assistant professor within the Program on Integrative Medicine, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research explores how self-compassion may strengthen relationship health and improve well-being outcomes, particularly in family caregiving and parent-child contexts. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, she is interested in adapting self-compassion interventions and their implementation to be maximally feasible, acceptable and beneficial for diverse families.
Ann Masten, Ph.D., is a Regents Professor, Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development and Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the Institute of Child Development in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota.
Masten studies competence, risk, and resilience in development, with a focus on the processes leading to positive adaptation and outcomes in children and families whose lives are threatened by adversity. The goal of her work is to inform science, practice, and policy seeking to understand and promote human adaptation and resilience.
Masten directs the Project Competence Research on Risk and Resilience (PCR3), which includes studies of normative populations and high-risk young people exposed to war, natural disasters, poverty, homelessness, and migration.
Masten’s research in Minnesota has focused on school success in homeless and other disadvantaged mobile children, with a focus on malleable protective processes, including parenting and self-regulation skills.
At the national and international level, Masten works with colleagues in multiple disciplines to understand adaptation and development, particularly in relation to migration, disasters, and war.
Bassam Khoury is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational & Counselling Psychology at McGill University, and he heads the McGill Mindfulness Research Lab (https://mcgill.ca/mmrl/), where he and his team conduct research on advancing the theory, research, and applications of mindfulness and compassion. The global aim of the research is to make a deep lasting change on both individuals and societies by embracing new ways of interacting with oneself, other people, and the natural environment including animals through the practices of mindfulness and compassion. Prof. Khoury published numerous papers on mindfulness and compassion in leading journals in the domains of clinical psychology and physical/medical health. His work (59-papers and 5 book-chapters) has gained international recognition, was cited over than 5500 times and was selected by the University of Cambridge’s Insights for Impact Report; a report published by the department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge citing the most impactful research papers in psychology worldwide. Furthermore, his work was ranked 67th worldwide on Web of Science in the category of clinical psychology. Dr. Khoury have also been recognized through multiple awards and nominations, including the Association of Psychological Science Emerging Scholars Rising Stars Award, and William Dawson Scholars Award.
Ryan Herringa, MD, PhD is the Director of the Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and the UW Health Professor in Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. He is a pediatric psychiatrist and neuroscientist whose work explores the neurobehavioral substrates of childhood traumatic stress and PTSD. He directs the BRAVE Research Center (Building Resilience to Adversity and Violent Experiences), which seeks to develop neuroscience-informed treatments for youth to enhance resilience and recovery. Specifically, the BRAVE Lab uses neuroimaging combined with behavioral, physiological, and genetic approaches to develop biomarkers of vulnerability, recovery, and resilience to childhood trauma. Dr. Herringa serves as the principal or co-investigator on several NIH funded research studies examining neural mechanisms of trauma and PTSD in both youth and adult populations. In addition to his research, Dr. Herringa remains active in clinical care and teaching, with specialization in the treatment of youth with trauma-related mental illness.
Dr. Herringa earned his MD and a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin – Madison as part of the Medical Scientist Training Program. He completed general psychiatry residency and a child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, and is board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) and member of the Society of Biological Psychiatry and American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. His work has been funded by AACAP, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and the NIH.
Almut Zieher is an Associate Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence in the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Zieher received their Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, their M.A. in Special Education, and their B.A. in Elementary Education from the University of New Mexico. Dr. Zieher’s experiences as a general and special education teacher lead her to study how teachers learn and engage in social and emotional behaviors to increase their well-being and pedagogical effectiveness. She uses social, emotional, and mindfulness theory and approaches to inform training and measure development. Previously they deployed a mindfulness training using the skills form Dialectical Behavioral Therapy with pre-service teachers. Currently her work is focused on teacher measures, including developing the Social and Emotional Learning Observational Checklist (SELOC, IES R305A210262) measuring elementary school teacher’s social and emotional teaching, a teacher self-report measure of emotion focused SEL implementation, and the Objective Awareness and Mindfulness Measure (OAMM) an objective teacher self-report measure funded by this Mind and Life PEACE grant. She is creating these measures to better understand and to improve social and emotional (including mindfulness) school programing, including which program components are beneficial for whom.
Natalie Avalos is as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and Affiliate Faculty in the Religious Studies and Women and Gender Studies Departments at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Dr. Avalos is an ethnographer of religion whose work in comparative Indigeneities explores urban Indian and Tibetan refugee religious life, healing historical trauma, and decolonial praxis. She received her doctorate from the University of California at Santa Barbara in Religious Studies with a special focus on Native American and Indigenous Religious Traditions and Tibetan Buddhism. She is a Ford Predoctoral Fellow, FTE Dissertation Fellow, and former CU Boulder Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Prior to joining CU Boulder, she taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies department at Connecticut College. She is currently working on her manuscript titled The Metaphysics of Decolonialization: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal. It argues that the reassertion of land-based logics among Native and Tibetan peoples not only de-centers settler colonial claims to legitimate knowledge but also articulates forms of sovereignty rooted in interdependent relations of power among all persons, human and other-than human. She is a Chicana of Apache descent, born and raised in the Bay Area.
Dr. Avalos’ approach to research and teaching is informed by decolonial theory as well as critical ethnic studies and critical Indigenous studies frameworks. A critical ethnic studies approach links the multiple intellectual traditions represented in ethnic studies to colonial logics such as heteronormativity, racial capitalism, and white supremacy. A critical Indigenous framework takes an endogenous approach to Indigenous life, centering Native epistemological claims, for instance that Indigenous notions of selfhood are co-extensive and bear consideration in projects for sovereignty and survival.
Rosalyn started at Mind & Life as a fundraising consultant and has been the Director of Advancement since 2022. She has an MBA in nonprofit management and a master’s degree in religious studies from the University of Bonn in Germany. Rosalyn is an internationally certified fundraising executive (CFRE) and has been working with philanthropists and non-profits in the meditation and mindfulness sector since 2016. She is the former Director of Fund Development for Shambhala Mountain Center, a meditation retreat center in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, where she lived, worked, and deepened her meditation practice for three and a half years. During her time at the Mountain Center, Rosalyn most notably directed a $2.3 million dollar grassroots fundraising campaign to build a wastewater collection system. In her free time, Rosalyn enjoys being outside in nature and spending time with friends, family, and her Cardigan Welsh Corgi, Sophie.
Abeba Birhane (PhD) is a cognitive scientist researching human behaviour, social systems, and responsible and ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI). She is a Senior Fellow Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation. Her interdisciplinary research explores various broad themes in cognitive science, AI, complexity science, and theories of decoloniality. Birhane examines the challenges and pitfalls of computational models (and datasets) from a conceptual, empirical, and critical perspective.
Joseph Henrich is a Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. His research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making and culture, and includes topics related to cultural learning, cultural evolution, culture-gene coevolution, human sociality, prestige, leadership, large-scale cooperation, religion and the emergence of complex human institutions. Methodologically, he integrates ethnographic tools from anthropology with experimental techniques drawn from psychology and economics. His area interests include Amazonia, Chile and Fiji.
