Nathan Fisher received his BA in Religious Studies (Honors) from Vanderbilt University in 2011. He then joined the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at Brown University where he managed the “Varieties of Contemplative Experience” study from 2012-2015. He received the Francisco J. Varela Research Award in 2012 and began a PhD program in Religious Studies and Cognitive Science at the University of California-Santa Barbara in the fall of 2015. His current research investigates Jewish and comparative mystical traditions as well as how science and religion are coming together in the emerging field of Contemplative Science.
Jared Lindahl, PhD is Visiting Scholar at the Cogut Center for the Humanities and Director of Humanistic Research in the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Brown University. He holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where his dissertation research adopted a bio-cultural methodology to investigate the significance of light-related experiences and discourses in Buddhist and Christian contemplative traditions. His ongoing scholarship examines the history of contemplative practices in a range of contexts—from classical Greece, India, and Tibet to Buddhist modernism and the mindfulness movement in the United States. Recently he has been working collaboratively with neuroscientists and clinical psychologists to investigate the theory and practice of meditation from both humanistic and scientific perspectives.
