Kimberly Schonert-Reichl is an applied developmental psychologist and a professor in the Human Development, Learning, and Culture area in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology and Special Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She is also the director of the Human Early Learning Partnership in the School of Population and Public Health in the Faculty of Medicine at UBC. She began her career as a middle school teacher and then was a teacher for “at risk” adolescents in an alternative high school. She received her master’s from the University of Chicago and her doctorate from the University of Iowa. She was a National Institute of Mental Health Postdoctoral Fellow in the Clinical Research Training Program in Adolescence at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry.

For more than two decades, her research has focused on the social and emotional development of children and adolescents in school and community settings.

Daniel Goleman, best known for his worldwide bestseller “Emotional Intelligence,” is most recently co-author of “Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain and Body.” A meditation practitioner since his college days, Goleman spent two years in India, first as a Harvard Predoctoral Traveling Fellow and then on a postdoctoral fellowship. Goleman’s first book, “The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience,” is written on the basis of that research, offering an overview of various meditation paths. Goleman has moderated several Mind & Life Dialogues between the Dalai Lama and scientists, ranging from topics such as “Emotions and Health” to “Environment, Ethics and Interdependence.” Goleman’s 2014 book, “A Force for Good: The Dalai Lama’s Vision for Our World,” combines the Dalai Lama’s key teachings, empirical evidence, and true accounts of people putting his lessons into practice, offering readers guidance for making the world a better place. Having worked with leaders, teachers, and groups around the globe, Goleman has transformed the way the world educates children, relates to family and friends, and conducts business.

Goleman is a Founding Steward of the Mind & Life Institute. He served on the Mind & Life Board of Directors from 1990 to 2017.

 

Yuki Imoto teaches anthropology in the liberal arts program at Keio University’s Faculty of Science and Technology. She completed her doctorate degree in social and cultural anthropology from the University of Oxford, where she also worked as a research associate at the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies. She has conducted fieldwork in multi- cultural, transnational, and alternative spaces of education within Japan, and has published numerous articles and books on this topic, relating her fieldwork experience to her own background of growing up biculturally. More recently, Yuki has been focusing her work on cross-cultural experiences/understandings of contemplative pedagogy, particularly in American and Japanese higher education. Between 2017 and 2018, she was based at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley as a Fulbright scholar, and conducted ethnographic fieldwork on contemplative education in several American universities and other spaces of learning, including the Mind & Life Institute. 

Imoto currently collaborates with a number of contemplative scholars, anthropologists, community activists and artists in the United States, United Kingdom and Japan, and is designing a liberal arts program that integrates first-, second- and third-person approaches into learning, teaching, and research. 

Koshikawa is a professor of psychology, Waseda University and the president of the Japanese Association of Mindfulness. Her research interest is the effectiveness of Eastern techniques, such as meditation and yoga, on reducing stress and increasing mental health. The focus of her recent research has been to understand how and why mindfulness meditation has effects on reduction of stress responses and how to use mindfulness meditation to empower people who find themselves stressed and exhausted. Koshikawa has practiced transcendental meditation, Zen meditation, and mindfulness meditation since graduate school. Her first encounter with mindfulness meditation was in a workshop in 1993 by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who created Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. She deepened understanding of it during her sabbatical at University of Oxford between 2003–2004, under Dr. Mark Williams, who developed Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy with Zindel Segal and John D. Teasdale. 

In addition to teaching students at the university, she also teaches mindfulness meditation in a mental clinic, a community center and elsewhere to help people cope with stress, anxiety, and depression. Her books include Horizons in Buddhist Psychology: Practice, Research & Theory (A Tao Institute Publication, 2009); Mindfulness: Basis and Practice (in Japanese) (Nippon Hyoron sha, 2016); the Japanese translation (Kitaoji Shobo, 2007) of Mindfulness- based Cognitive Therapy for Depression: A new approach to preventing relapse (Guilford, 2002); Japan (translated by Chun-shu company, 2007); Buddhism Meditation Theories (Chun-shu company, 2008); History of Japanese Buddhism (Shunsha Co., 2015), among others.


Masaki Matsubara, Ph.D. Masaki Matsubara is a scholar of Japanese religions at the East Asia Program at Cornell University and is also a Japanese Rinzai Zen priest. Following his Zen monastic training, he received his M.A. in Asian Studies and Ph.D. in Asian Religions from Cornell University. His doctoral dissertation focused on Zen master Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1769), a seminal figure occupying a prominent place in the history of Japanese religion. 

Matsubara’s research examines issues regarding identity, memory, and authenticity, specifically how these are culturally, socially, and historically developed in the tradition mechanisms of building, reinvention, and maintenance within contemporary Japanese Zen Buddhism (1868– present). His research focuses primarily on a study of the invention of Buddhist traditions and its effects on the identity creation of Buddhist religious figures, with particular emphasis on various historical, social, and institutional forces and factors in a particular historical context that have determined our received images of the past. 

Matsubara taught Buddhist studies, East Asian languages and cultures, and religious studies at University of California, Berkeley (2009-2013) and was a fellow at the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford University (2013-14). His courses ranged from modern to contemporary topics, including the particular narrative genres of biography, autography, hagiography, and translation. He also currently serves as an adjunct affiliated chaplain with Cornell United Religious Work at Cornell University. He is the head abbot of Butsumoji Zen Temple in Chiba, Japan, supervising a nearby affiliated International Zen Center in Japan and traveling between the United States and Japan to lead seminars and retreats. Matsubara is the author of “Hakuin Ekaku” in Oxford Bibliographies in Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2014). He currently resides in New York City.

Minowa was born in Chiba Prefecture (Japan) in 1960. He graduated from Tokyo University in 1983. He has been a professor at the graduate school of Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of Tokyo since April 2010. His specialty is Japanese Buddhism and history of Buddhist thought. In particular, he is interested in the acceptance of precepts and the development of meditation. He studies how monks actually practiced and researches the development of meditation from India to China and to Japan, while trying not to forget the connection of his research and the present age. He is author of The Religion of Japan (translated by Chun-shu company, 2007); Buddhism Meditation Theories (Chun-shu company, 2008); History of Japanese Buddhism (Shunsha Co., 2015), among others.

Gaelle is a Mind & Life Fellow with years of previous experience conducting research in contemplative neuroscience. After receiving a Masters degree in computer science and a PhD in cognitive and neural systems, she served on the research faculty at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School where she investigated the effects of meditation on the brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Gaelle is also a former Grants & Science Manager at Mind & Life.