Jessica Morey is the executive director, lead teacher and cofounder of Inward Bound Mindfulness Education (iBme), a nonprofit organization that offers mindfulness meditation retreats for teens, young adults and parents and professionals who work with teens. She has been leading retreats for ten years through iBme and with Against the Stream and Insight communities for the past five years. She began practicing meditation over two decades ago on teen retreats offered by the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) and then participated in the IMS young adult mentoring group for ten years. She is currently part of the IMS teacher training. She and the work of iBme were recently featured on the December 2016 cover of
“Mindful Magazine” and she was interviewed on Dan Harris’ podcast “10% Happier” about her lifelong meditation practice and work with youth. Before joining iBme, she worked in clean energy and climate policy and finance. She holds a BA in Environmental Engineering from Dartmouth College and a master’s degrees in Sustainable Development and International Affairs. Her published works range from the chapter “Ordinary Awakening” in “Blue Jean Buddha” to “Conflict Resolution of the Boruca Hydro-Energy Project: Renewable Energy Production in Costa Rica.” She wrote about the relationship between her climate policy work and Buddhism in “Bodhi Trees,” a review in “Shambhala Sun.”

Lama Thupten Dorje Gyaltsen Rinpoche (Jerry Gardner) has studied the Buddhist Dharma for over 45 years with an emphasis in the Long-chen Nying Thig tradition of the Nyingma sect and the Chokling tradition. In 1970 he began his formal training with Geshe Wangyal in New Jersey and with Lama Sonam T. Kazi in New York City. In 1988 Lama Thupten Rinpoche traveled to Nepal and became a disciple of the late Venerable Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. Over the past 27 years Lama Thupten Rinpoche has traveled annually to Nepal and India to study and do retreats with Chatral Rinpoche, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, Konchok Monlam Rinpoche, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Dzogcehn Khenpo Choga Rinpoche, Dupsing Rinpoche
and Lama Dawa Rinpoche. Lama Thupten Rinpoche was ordained as lama in 1997 by the late Khenpo Thupten Oser Rinpoche of Ngagyur Samten Chokhorling Institute in India and was recognized as Rinpoche in 2013 by Konchok Monlam Rinpoche and Dupsing Rinpoche. In 1993, under the guidance of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Lama Thupten Rinpoche established Urgyen Samten Ling Gonpa in Salt Lake City and is presently the resident teacher there. He is also a theatre professor at the University of Utah where he teaches dance, movement and theatre; and is master instructor of Wing Chun Kung-Fu, T’ai Chi Chu’an, and Qi Gong at his Red Lotus School of Movement in Salt Lake City.

Arthur Zajonc is the former President of the Mind & Life Institute. He is also emeritus professor of physics at Amherst College, where he taught from 1978 to 2012, and former director of the Center for Contemplative Mind, which supports appropriate inclusion of contemplative practice in higher education, from 2009 to 2011.

He was a visiting professor and research scientist at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, and the Universities of Rochester and Hannover. He was a Fulbright professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. His research includes studies in electron-atom physics, parity violation in atoms, quantum optics, the experimental foundations of quantum physics, and the relationship between science, the humanities, and contemplative traditions.

He has written extensively on Goethe’s science work, and is the author of Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind. He coauthored The Quantum Challenge, and co-edited Goethe’s Way of Science. In 1997, he served as scientific coordinator for the Mind & Life dialogue published as The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama; organized the 2002 dialogue “The Nature of Matter, the Nature of Life;” and acted as moderator at MIT for the “Investigating the Mind” dialogue in 2003. The proceedings of the Mind & Life-MIT meeting were published under the title The Dalai Lama at MIT.

As director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, Zajonc fostered the use of contemplative practice in college and university classrooms, and developed the foundations for contemplative pedagogy. He coauthored The Heart of Higher Education: A Call to Renewal with Parker Palmer. Out of this work and his long-standing meditative practice, Zajonc authored Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love, and contributed to the Psychology Today blog on meditation. He served as general secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America, was a co-founder of the Kira Institute, president of the Lindisfarne Association, and a senior program director at the Fetzer Institute.

Zajonc served on the Mind & Life Board of Directors from 1998 to 2006. He served as Mind & Life President from 2012 to 2015.