Jack Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India and Burma. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974 and is one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. After Asian Studies at Dartmouth College he joined the Peace Corps and worked on tropical medicine teams in the Mekong River valley. He studied with Buddhist masters Ven. Ajahn Chah, and Ven. Mahasi Sayadaw. Jack co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, with colleagues Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein and then Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California. Jack has taught in leading universities, convened International Buddhist Teacher meetings, and trained hundreds of teachers. He holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is a father, husband, grandfather and activist.

His books have been translated into 22 languages and sold more than a million copies. They include, The Wise Heart; A Path with Heart; After the Ecstasy, the Laundry; Teachings of the Buddha; Seeking the Heart of Wisdom; Living Dharma; A Still Forest Pool; The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness and Peace; Bringing Home the Dharma; and No Time Like the Present.

Jack is featured in the Mind & Life podcast episode Wisdom for our times.

Nielsen leads the National Institute on Aging (NIA)’s Individual Behavioral Processes Branch, which supports behavioral, psychological and integrative biobehavioral research on the mechanistic pathways linking social and behavioral factors to health in mid-life and older age. She examines aging processes across the full life course, including early life influences on later life outcomes, as well as research on behavioral and social processes in midlife that play a causal role in shaping trajectories of aging. Her own portfolio supports transdisciplinary research in affective science, health psychology, and life-span developmental psychology. She coordinates NIA research initiatives on midlife reversibility of risk associated with early life adversity, conscientiousness and healthy aging, socioemotional influences on decision-making, and stress measurement. She serves on the Implementation Team for the trans-NIH Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) Common Fund Program, which promotes a mechanisms-focused experimental medicine approach to behavior change intervention design.

Lis Nielsen, in her personal capacity, served on the Mind & Life Steering Council from Summer 2018 to Fall 2020.

Elizaveta Solomonova is an interdisciplinary scientist of the mind, working at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and the arts. Her main research interest is the neurophenomenology of conscious experiences across sleep, wake and contemplative states. She is currently finishing an interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Montreal, and starting a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University’s Neurophilosophy Lab. She has been working at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine and at the Topological Media Lab at Concordia University. She previously worked on a variety of projects in neuroscience of sleep and in media arts, including meditation, sense of presence, sleep paralysis, sensory incorporation in sleep, memory consolidation, nightmares, emotion regulation, collective experiences, and experimental philosophy. In addition, she is a research scientist at the YHouse, a New York-based nascent interdisciplinary institute, dedicated to the study of awareness from biological, phenomenological and contemplative perspectives.

Brooke D. Lavelle, PhD, is the Co-Founder and President of the Courage of Care Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to facilitating the co-creation of a more just, compassionate world. Together with her diverse, interdisciplinary, and multi-generational team at Courage, Brooke provides training and consultation in relational compassion practices, anti-oppressive pedagogies, restorative healing methods, and systems tools to social service and caring professionals, as well as to educational, spiritual, and human rights organizations.

Holding a PhD in Buddhist Studies from Emory University and an MA in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism from Columbia University, Brooke’s academic work focuses on the diversity of contemplative models for cultivating compassion as well as the ways in which spiritual practice and social activism inform one another. 

Brooke is a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany, where she co-developed a climate justice program for ecological sustainability researchers. She has served as a lecturer at San Francisco State University and as an education consultant to the Mind & Life Institute, the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia, Teachers College at Columbia University, The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, and the Greater Good Science Center at University of California, Berkeley.

In 2016, Brooke received a Mind & Life Think Tank grant to study various conceptualizations of compassion, which she is now applying in her work to include a more consistent justice and equity framework in research and training in the field. She recently completed a book manuscript on courage and spiritual activism and is co-writing a book on compassion and equity in education with an education collaborative she founded in Oakland.

Brooke splits her time between Berlin, Brooklyn, and the Bay Area, and travels regularly to lead Courage workshops and retreats in the US and abroad. Brooke will be leading the contemplative faculty at the 2020 Summer Research Institute, where she will bring her expertise and skills to bear on the theme of “Cultivating Prosociality Across the Lifespan”.

Catherine Shaddix, PhD began her training in Buddhist meditation and hatha yoga in 1991. She is greatly fortunate to have studied under Tsoknyi Rinpoche for the past 12 years, as well as to have received teachings from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Venerable Trulshik Rinpoche, and Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. In addition, she was a student of Sazaki Roshi in the Rinzai Zen tradition for eight years, living for two of those years at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center. Her primary yoga teachers are Richard Freeman and Mary Taylor at the Yoga Workshop, with whom she has studied traditional Ashtanga yoga for 17 years. She has also trained extensively in
Mysore, South India, with the late Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. Her teaching style is greatly influenced by her early studies of Iyengar yoga as well as by her Buddhis meditation practice. In 2013 Catherine was invited to design and is currently co-facilitating a mindfulness meditation and Ashtanga yoga program emphasizing emotion regulation for the Baywell Psychiatry Group, a consortium of UCSF psychiatrists. She is also a co-facilitator for the TARA study, which is investigating the integration of Ashtanga yoga and body-centered awareness training in a novel intervention for teen depression at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.

Andreas Roepstorff, Ph.D. is Professor, Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience and Department of Social Anthropology, Aarhus University / Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark.

As an anthropologist in neuroscience, Andreas tries to maintain a dual perspective. He studies the workings of the brain, particularly at the levels of consciousness, cognition and communication. He is equally interested in how brain imaging, as a field of knowledge production, relates to other scientific and public fields.

He is project manager of Technologies of the Mind:

People have a unique capability to change actions, behavior and their ways of organizing. The technologies that surround us influence our perception of the world, but at the same time our ways of organizing ourselves is part of a technology that influences the world we are living in. How are we going to understand the interaction between technology, practice, and cognition? This project is focusing on how human thought activity exploits technology and culture and how it is influenced in return. Usually the brain is seen as a biological and “natural” part of the body, that can be separated from “artificial” inventions like culture and technology. As opposed to this, this project tries to understand technology as a way of using the brain and body, incorporated into practices that people develop naturally to reach different objectives. This project includes resources from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and cognitive sciences to investigate e.g. rituals, reading and writing, masquerades, and physical objects. 

Andreas edited Imagining Nature: Practices of Cosmology and Identity and coedited Trusting the Subject? (Volumes 1 and 2). Read the full list of his publications. 

Andreas earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Biology at the University of Aarhus in 1995. He earned his BA and MA in Social Anthropology at the University of Aarhus in 1996. He earned his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the University of Aarhus in 2002.

Andreas was featured on the Mind & Life Podcast episode: Interacting Minds.

David McMahan, PhD is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the editor of Buddhism in the Modern World (Routledge 2012) and author of The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford, 2008), Empty Vision: Metaphor and Visionary Imagery in Mahāyāna Buddhism (Routledge Curzon, 2002), and a number of articles on Mahāyāna Buddhism in South Asia and Buddhism in the modern world. He has written on Indian Buddhist literature, visual metaphors and practice, and the early history of the Mahāyāna movement in India. More recently, his work has focused on the interface of Buddhism and modernity, including its interactions with science, psychology, modernist literature, romanticism, and transcendentalism. He is currently researching the various ways that Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditation is understood and practiced in different cultural and historical contexts, ancient and modern.

Laurence J. Kirmayer, MD, FRCPC, FCAHS, FRSC is James McGill Professor and Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University. He is Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry, and Director of the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry, Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, where he conducts research on culturally responsive mental health services, the mental health of indigenous peoples, and the anthropology of psychiatry. He founded and directs the annual Summer Program and Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry at McGill. His past research includes studies on cultural consultation,
pathways and barriers to mental health care for immigrants and refugees, somatization in primary care, and indigenous concepts of mental health
and resilience. Current projects include: culturally based, family centered mental health promotion for Aboriginal youth; the use of cultural formulation in cultural consultation; and the place of culture in global mental health. He co-edited the volumes, Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives (Cambridge University Press), Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada (University of British Columbia Press), Cultural Consultation: Encountering the Other in Mental Health Care (Springer), DSM-5 Handbook for the Cultural Formulation Interview (APPI), and Re-Visioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience and Global Mental Health (Cambridge). He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Social Sciences).

Catherine Kerr, PhD was director of translational neuroscience at the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University. Her neuroscience research focused on neural dynamics underlying embodied attention and the sense of touch. Her team was the first to publish results showing how embodied attention changes cortical rhythms in the “touch cortex” (primary somatosensory cortex) and how mindfulness is associated with enhanced modulation of these embodied attentional rhythms. In addition to these neurophysiological studies, she drew on her background as a qualitative researcher and investigator of placebo effects to pioneer methods for linking quantitative, neural studies with qualitative studies of patient experience. Her last research project focused on isolating neurophysiological, immunological and experiential mechanisms underlying cancer survivors’ reports of “energy” and vitality in contemplative practice.

Cathy Kerr passed away in 2016. Her sister, Sarah Kerr, wrote this obituary.

The Mind & Life Catherine Kerr Award for Courageous and Compassionate Science was established in 2016 in her memory.

Martijn van Beek, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and based at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University in Denmark. He lived and worked among Tibetan Buddhist communities for extended periods since the early 1980s, particularly in Ladakh. His earlier research examined the nexus between development, religious identification, and the dynamics of communal conflict. For the past several years, his research has focused on contemplative practices, lineages, and communities in the contemporary world, in the West as well as in Asia. He has a particular academic as well as personal interest in the refiguring of contemplative life in the context of normative secularism and the scientific worldview. Together with colleagues in the cognitive and health sciences, he has been involved in (neuro-) scientific research on contemplative practices and their effects and is particularly interested in the methodological and conceptual challenges of experimental and experiential research on contemplative practices and contemplative life. He collaborates closely with colleagues from a number of disciplines to explore the potential of “microphenomenological” elicitation interviews for contemplative research, teaching, and practice. Together with other members of the Danish Society for the Promotion of Life Wisdom in Children, he is also involved in research and practice in contemplative education, including through the teacher training programme Training Empathy, to help school teachers facilitate the unfolding of children’s innate potential for presence and empathy. He is affiliated with Vaekstcenteret, a contemplative community in Denmark.