Susan Bauer-Wu, PhD, RN, is a contemplative clinical scientist, mindfulness teacher, author, non-profit and health care leader, and registered nurse. Susan served as President of the Mind & Life Institute from December 2015 to December 2023. She was an NIH-funded researcher and Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar who received one of the first NIH R01 grants to study meditation in 2005. An early teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), Susan completed MBSR teacher clinical practicum training in 1999. She has held leadership positions and/or taught at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Emory University, and the University of Virginia (UVA). Prior to joining Mind & Life, Susan was the Kluge Professor in Contemplative End-of-Life Care and director of the Compassionate Care Initiative at UVA, with dual faculty appointments in Nursing and Religious Studies. She was also a Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellow and served as president of the Society for Integrative Oncology. Susan completed a PhD in psychoneuroimmunology at Rush University in Chicago and post-doctoral training in psycho-oncology and behavioral medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. In 2021, Mindful recognized her as one of “the most powerful women in the mindfulness movement.” She is the author of two books: A Future We Can Love: How to Reverse the Climate Crisis through the Power of Our Hearts and Minds (Shambhala, 2023) and Leaves Falling Gently: Living Fully with Serious Illness through Mindfulness, Compassion, and Connectedness (Shambhala, 2025). Susan is a Mind & Life Fellow and currently serves and consults with values-aligned organizations and guides individuals and groups in purpose-full living and dying (coming-to-life.com).


 

Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD is a Buddhist teacher; Founder and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico; a social activist; author;  and in her early years was an anthropologist at Columbia University (1964-68) and University of Miami School of Medicine (1970-72). She is a pioneer in the field of end-of-life care. She has lectured on the subject of death and dying at many academic institutions and medical centers around the world. She received a National Science Foundation Fellowship in Visual Anthropology, was an Honorary Research Fellow in Medical Ethnobotany at Harvard University, was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress, received the Pioneer Medal for Outstanding Leadership in Health Care by HealthCare Chaplaincy, the Sandy MacKinnon Award from Covenant Health in Canada, Pioneer Medal for Outstanding Leadership in Health Care, received an Honorary DSc from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. She has received many other awards and honors from institutions around the world for her work as a social and environmental activist and in the end-of-life care field.

From 1972-1975, she worked with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center with dying cancer patients. She has continued to work with dying people and their families, and to teach health care professionals and family caregivers the psycho-social, ethical, and spiritual aspects of care of the dying. She is Director of the Project on Being with Dying, and Founder of the Upaya Prison Project that develops programs on meditation for prisoners. She is also founder of the Nomads Clinic in Nepal.

Her books include: The Human Encounter with Death (with Stanislav Grof); The Fruitful Darkness, A Journey Through Buddhist Practice; Simplicity in the Complex: A Buddhist Life in America; Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Wisdom in the Presence of Death; Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet; Sophie Learns to Be Brave.

She has been involved with the Mind and Life Institute since its inception and is founder of the Varela International Symposium. 

Books | Film Credits

Roshi Joan Halifax is a Founding Steward of the Mind & Life Institute. She served on the Mind & Life Board of Directors from 2005 to 2017.

 

Jeremy Hunter, PhD, is the great-grandson of a sumo wrestler as well as Associate Professor of Practice at the Peter F. Drucker School of Management. Over a decade ago, he created and still teaches The Executive Mind, a series of challenging and transformative executive education courses dedicated to Drucker’s assertion that “You cannot manage other people unless you manage yourself first.” Hunter challenges leaders to transform themselves to more effectively face the demands of a complex and turbulent world. He has designed and led leadership development programs for a wide variety of organizations, including Fortune 200 aerospace, Fortune 50 banking and finance, accounting, the arts and civic non-profits. Program impacts have lead to both positive professional, personal and financial outcomes. He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. His work is informed by the experience of living day-to-day for 17 years with a potentially terminal illness, and when faced with the need for life-saving surgery, having more than a dozen former students come forward as organ donors. He received his PhD from University of Chicago, an MPP from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a BA in East Asian Studies from Wittenberg University.

Femke E. Bakker, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in Political Science at the Institute of Political Science of Leiden University, where she teaches courses in political psychology and research methods. As a researcher, Femke is well known for thinking ‘out of the box’, which might be due to her creative background in the performing arts. After a career of almost two decades as a professional actor, Femke decided to study political science and received her Ph.D. in 2018. She won several awards for her master thesis, and her dissertation “Hawks and Doves. Democratic peace theory revisited” received the ECPR Jean Blondel PhD prize, the most prestigious PhD award within European political science. She published in several international peer reviewed journals, serves as book reviews editor of Acta Politica, and is associate member of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research. Femke’s research focusses on the role individuals play within political processes. She studies elite decision making, political leadership, and political behavior. She uses the PEACE grant to conduct a pilot study about the impact of meditation on political tolerance. Femke also teaches meditation, and offers guided meditations and courses through the free international meditation platform Insight Timer.

I am a tenure track assistant professor and director of the Close Relationships and Health Lab at the University of Delaware. I received my PhD in social psychology from the University of California Santa Barbara and then completed my postdoctoral training at the Ohio State University. I utilize a social psychological approach to understand the effects of social disconnection on motivation, physiology, and health. My expertise lies at the interface between physiology and psychology with a specialization in psychoneuroimmunology and psychoneuroendocrinology. More recently, I became interested in interventions that could improve social connection between romantic partners. Because romantic relationship quality is so robustly linked to health outcomes, improving a person’s romantic relationship should thereby improve their health.

Evelyn Lutwama-Rukundo, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Women and Gender Studies, Makerere University (Uganda). She attained her PhD at the School of English, University of Leeds, U.K., her M (phil) at the Centre of Women’s Research, University of Bergen, Norway, her MA in Communication for Development at the University of Malmo, Sweden and her Undergraduate degree in Arts at Makerere University, Uganda. Her research interest is gender in communication, identity formation and representation. Some of her publications include: “That’s my Space: Ageing, Gender and Survival in Ugandan Theatre”, “Skimpy Fashion and Sexuality in Sheebah Karungi’s Performances”, “Dancing to Change: Gender in the Popular Music of Kampala”, “Western Theatrical Performance in Africa and Gender Implications” and a book Communication for Development: Community Theatre and Women’s Rights in Buganda (Uganda). Besides her academic engagement, Lutwama-Rukundo is a screenwriter and director. Her forthcoming film is a documentary on the trajectory of gender studies in Ugandan universities entitled We’ve Got to Have It.

Sarah N. Ssali, PhD, is an Associate Professor and Dean, School of Gender Studies (Makerere University) where Gendered Identities, Masculinities and Men’s Studies are taught. She is also the Director, ARUA Centre of Excellence in Notions of Identity in Africa. She is a Social Scientist with a PhD in International Health Studies. She has vast research experience as Principal or co-Principal Investigator, using both qualitative and quantitative research methods and designs including surveys, stepped wedge designs, social networks analysis, ethnographic methods, life histories, narratives. She has researched and published in health systems, health financing, HIV and AIDS, post conflict settings, hidden behaviours, minorities, institutionalised identities, state policy and practice. She also trained in Stepping Stones. Gender and ethics underpin her work. She teaches Gender and the State, Research Methods, Fundamentals of Social Science and Health and Institutions and social transformation, including how certain behaviours and identities become normalized and dominant.

I was born in North Carolina and studied English Literature at Duke University. After graduation, I discovered my passion for working with children and child advocacy while volunteering as a CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate), which prompted me to obtain an M.A. in Developmental Psychopathology at the Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Following a year of work on a research project with mothers addicted to opioids and their children, I attended the University of Vermont, where I earned my Ph.D. in clinical psychology under Dr. Rex Forehand, who taught me Parent Management Training as a clinical tool and developed my interest and expertise in research on families impacted by Major Depressive Disorder. I then spent several years at the University of North Carolina as a postdoctoral fellow studying African American single mother families with Dr. Deborah Jones. I served on the faculty at Clark University in Worcester, MA, and at the University of Georgia, in Athens, before joining Georgia State University.

My research program has focused on (a) exploring parenting behaviors associated with youth well-being and psychopathology, and (b) testing prevention and intervention programs designed to increase youth well-being across a number of populations.

My research has focused on developing multi-method assessments for measuring children’s empathy, especially their empathic happiness, and understanding its role in children’s healthy social development, positive self-perceptions, and mental health. I was recently awarded a Visionary Grant from the American Psychological Foundation (The Neurobiology of Sharing Others’ Happiness: A Clue to Understanding Children’s Aggression?) and a Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (Neural Processes Underlying Interpretations of Emotions in Children at Risk for Depression) to investigate children’s empathic responses to others’ sadness and happiness with novel designs that employ behavioral, cognitive, affective, physiological, and neural measurements. My training to conduct this research included an NIMH Fellowship in Mental Health as an undergraduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, an NIMH-NRSA fellowship (Vulnerability to Psychopathology in Preschool-Aged Children of Depressed and Well Mothers) as a graduate student at Emory University, and an NIMH NRSA fellowship (Neurobehavioral Aspects of Personality and Psychopathology) as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota. I am currently an associate professor of clinical psychology at Georgia State University (GSU) where my research evaluates programs that enhance children’s capacity for empathic happiness and parents’ skills for fostering children’s prosocial motivations and healthy empathy.