The Dalai Lama is a man of peace. He has consistently advocated policies of non-violence, even in the face of extreme aggression. He also became the first Nobel Laureate to be recognized for his concern for global environmental problems. He has travelled to more than 67 countries spanning six continents. He has received over 150 awards and honorary doctorates in recognition of his message of peace, non-violence, inter-religious understanding, universal responsibility and compassion. He has also authored or co-authored more than 110 books, including the “Book of Joy” with Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was born on 6 July 1935 to a farming family in a small hamlet of Tibet. He is now the spiritual leader of Tibet, yet describes himself as a simple Buddhist monk. At the age of 23 he passed a rigorous examination with honors and was awarded the Geshe Lharampa degree, equivalent to the highest doctorate in Buddhist philosophy. In 1950, after China’s invasion of Tibet, he was called upon to assume full political power. Therefore, in 1954, he went to Beijing and met with Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders. Five years later, following the brutal suppression of the Tibetan national uprising in Lhasa by Chinese troops, the Dalai Lama was forced to escape into exile. Since then he has been living in Dharamsala, northern India.

In 1963, he presented a draft democratic constitution for Tibet. The charter enshrines freedom of speech, belief, assembly and movement. It also provides detailed guidelines on the functioning of the Tibetan Administration with respect to Tibetans living in exile. In 1992, the Central Tibetan Administration published guidelines for the constitution of a future, free Tibet. In 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent struggle for the liberation of Tibet.

Rev. Canon Mpho Tutu Van Furth is a priest, wife, mother, artist, theologian, and public speaker. She is passionate about the flourishing of all people, especially girls, and the planet. She is the daughter of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Leah Tutu.

Tutu Van Furth has traveled extensively as a public speaker and priest. She has previously worked in Washington, D.C. and New York City in programs providing loans and scholarships to South Africans and refugees. She was ordained by the Episcopal Church in 2004. She founded the Tutu Institute for Prayer and Pilgrimage in 2005, and served as its executive director until 2011. From 2011 until 2016, she worked as executive director of the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation. She has co-authored two books with her father, Made for Goodness and The Book of Forgiving, and has co-authored a book about her father, Tutu: The Authorized Portrait.

Read her talk on ubuntu from her website »

Lily Mafela is a Professor of History and History Education at the University of Botswana in the Department of Languages and Social Sciences Education. She joined her department in 1983 as a newly graduated Staff Development Fellow. Following attainment of the MEd (History Teaching) degree from the University of Bristol, she served as head of the department. Between 1987 and 1993, Mafela studied at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, obtaining an MA and PhD in History, with a major in African History and a minor in Latin American History. Her doctoral dissertation, funded by a competitive award from the Rockefeller Foundation of New York, focused on gender analysis of the history of education in pre-colonial and colonial Botswana. She is currently revising that work for publication as a book. Subsequently, she earned an MBA from the De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. Mafela has published in the fields of history and education, with a particular focus on issues of social inclusion in education delivery, and in historical writing. A passionate educator with keen understanding of the multifaceted role of education in overall development, she is one of the pioneers of research that established the disturbing link between teenage pregnancy and lack of girls’ attainment of higher levels of education, subsequent to which ameliorative strategies have been implemented to promote better life chances for girls in Botswana’s education system. Mafela has demonstrated her leadership capabilities in many spheres of activity. She has served in key positions at regional and international levels, such as the Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA), and the Association for African Historians (AAH), in each of which she served as executive board member. For a little under a decade now, she has also been serving in the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Project on the Pedagogical Use of the General History of Africa Volumes (PUGHA) as Rapporteur. This project aims to promote transformative approaches to the teaching of African history. The project also seeks to promote mutual understanding, interdependence and peaceful coexistence.

Marieke van Vugt is an assistant professor at the Bernoulli Institute of Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the University of Groningen (Netherlands). She obtained her PhD in neuroscience focusing on the role of brain oscillations in recognition memory with Dr. Michael Kahana at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. She then went on to do postdoctoral research on the neural correlates of decision making with Dr. Jonathan Cohen at Princeton University before starting her own group as a tenure track assistant professor in Groningen in 2010.

Her research focuses on dissecting the fundamental cognitive operations and neural processes involved in making decisions, and on how our decisions are affected by mind-wandering on the one hand, and meditation on the other. She makes use of a combination of computational modeling, neuroscience, and experimental psychology tools. She has developed a unique approach to studying meditation by using computational models of cognition. She has also developed a novel method to track perseverative cognition. She is also a pioneer in developing computational models of meditation and mind-wandering to better understand why, how, and when we get distracted. She tries to understand how the synchrony between brains is involved in social cognition, and has applied those methods in unusual contexts ranging from Tibetan Buddhist monks to dancers.

In addition to this academic career, she has been a practicing Tibetan Buddhist since 1998, and she also is a semi-professional classical ballet dancer. She very much enjoys projects where science, art, and contemplation meet.

Aaron Stern is a composer, educator, internationally recognized consultant on learning, and the founder of the Academy for the Love of Learning, a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based educational institution. He conceived the Academy with musician Leonard Bernstein, and serves as its President and educational leader. The Academy was founded as a “think and do tank” to develop, practice, foster research on, and disseminate its transformative learning methods, which are designed to activate the natural love of learning as a transformative practice in people of all ages. To accomplish this, the Academy offers a comprehensive set of programs grounded in its learning model and innovative awareness-based practices through its various institutes, including the Institute for Teaching; Institute for Living Story; Institute for Foundation Studies, which offers the Academy’s pioneering leadership program; Leading by Being, Institute for Organizational Learning; and others.

Sonia Lupien is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress whose mission is to transfer scientifically validated knowledge on stress to the general public. Her studies have shown that children are as vulnerable as adults to stress and that children as young as age six can produce high levels of stress hormones. Her studies in adults have shown that stress can significantly impair memory performance. In her new research projects, Lupien is working on differences between men and women in stress reactivity, and she is developing new educational programs on stress in adolescents and employees. Greatly involved in the transfer of scientific knowledge to the public, Lupien has published a book for the public entitled Par amour du stress now translated in English under the title Well Stressed: Manage Stress Before It Turns Toxic, which aims at helping the public better understand stress as it has been studied for the last 50 years by scientists across the world.

Michel Boivin, Ph.D., is the Canada Research Chair in Child Development, professor of Psychology, Director of the Research Unit on Children’s Psychosocial Maladjustment at the School of Psychology of Université Laval, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He leads a program of research on the bio-psycho-social determinants of child development, with a special emphasis on early childhood. This research is anchored to large population-based longitudinal studies, including the Quebec Newborn Twin Study and the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development. Boivin has extensively published in leading international journals in psychology, psychiatry and pediatrics, including three books, 44 book chapters, and 226 articles. He co-leads the Center of Excellence in Early Childhood Development and the web-based and multilingual Encyclopaedia on Early Childhood Development, two international initiatives aimed at knowledge dissemination. He has trained more than 50 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows.