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.
Carol Worthman is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University (Atlanta), where she also directs the Laboratory for Comparative Human Biology. After taking a dual undergraduate degree in biology and botany at Pomona College, Dr. Worthman took her PhD in biological anthropology at Harvard University, having also studied endocrinology at UCSD and neuroscience at MIT under Jack Geller and Richard Wurtman, respectively. She joined the nascent anthropology faculty at Emory University in 1986, and established a laboratory pioneering the use of biomarkers in population research. Professor Worthman takes a biocultural approach to pursuit of comparative interdisciplinary research on human development, and biocultural bases of differential mental and physical health. She has conducted cross-cultural biosocial research in thirteen countries, as well as in rural, urban, and semi-urban areas of the United States. For over 20 years, she collaborated in the Great Smoky Mountains Study, a large, longitudinal, population-based developmental epidemiological project in western North Carolina. She has led development and implementation of the neuroscience component in the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative since its inception in 2008.
Carol Worthman served on the Mind & Life Steering Council from Spring 2016 to Spring 2019.
Wendy J. Weber, ND, PhD, MPH, joined NCCIH as a program director in 2009. She oversees NCCIH’s portfolio of health services research, studies of complementary medicine to promote of healthy behavior, and complex complementary/integrative medicine intervention research to include traditional Chinese medicine, naturopathy, integrative medicine and Ayurveda. Dr. Weber’s interests include the use of complementary medicine interventions for common pediatric conditions, mental health conditions, promoting healthy behaviors, and health services research. Dr. Weber is the coordinator for NCCIH’s Preliminary Clinical Studies in Preparation for Large Interventional Trials of Complementary and Alternative Medicine Therapies (R34) program. She is also the NCCIH representative to the NIH Common Fund Science of Behavior Change program and the NIH Prevention Research Coordinating Committee. Dr. Weber earned a Doctorate of Philosophy in epidemiology and a Master of Public Health from the University of Washington. She earned a Doctorate of Naturopathic Medicine (N.D.) from Bastyr University. Prior to joining NCCIH, she was a research associate professor at Bastyr University, where her research included the study of herbal treatments for pediatric conditions.
Hanne De Jaegher (DPhil, 2007, University of Sussex) is a philosopher of cognitive science fascinated by how we think, work, play—basically, live and love—together. She developed the theory of intersubjectivity called participatory sense-making. Grounded in enactive cognitive science, dynamical systems theory, and phenomenology, this theory is applied across various academic and applied disciplines. Her latest project is to write an engaged—even engaging—epistemology, which understands knowing as based in the ongoing existential tensions of loving.
I am interested in the plasticity of human consciousness. My research investigates practices that aim to
transform subjective experience—from meditation and hypnosis to placebos, prayer, and contemplative
therapies. I work from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining cognitive, neurobiological, and
phenomenological approaches to shed light on mechanisms of self-regulation in both health and
pathology.
I completed my PhD in neuroscience at McGill University and am currently working with Tanya M.
Luhrmann as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. My work has been supported by the Natural Sciences and
Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada (SSHRC), the Bial Foundation, and the Mind & Life Institute. Before my doctorate, I completed
a master’s in neuroscience and an undergraduate with honours in psychology and minors in philosophy
and world religions, all at McGill.
William Waldron teaches courses on the South Asian religious traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, Tibetan religion and history, comparative psychologies and philosophies of mind, and theory and method in the study of religion. His publications focus on the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism and its dialogue with modern thought. Professor Waldron has been at Middlebury College since 1996. His monograph, The Buddhist Unconscious: The Alaya-vijñana in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought, was published by RoutledgeCurzon in 2003. He is currently working on an introduction to Yogacara cognitive theory in relation to cognitive science.
An internationally-sought-after mindfulness teacher and keynote speaker, and a thought and practice innovator of mindfulness-based social justice principles, concepts and practices, Rhonda V. Magee, M.A., J.D., is Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco.
Rhonda has spent more than 20 years integrating mindfulness into higher education, leadership, and everyday social engagement. Her work explores the intersections of anti-racist education, social justice, and contemplative practices, and offering trauma-sensitive practices to support healing, resilience, personal wellbeing, and flourishing together. Grounded in the science of mindfulness, wellbeing, and resilience, she integrates storytelling, movement, journaling, and other research-based experiential practices for strengthening our inner resources for navigating a world of constant change.
In recognition of her uniquely innovative impact on the field of mindfulness and wellbeing in law, Rhonda was the inaugural recipient of the Reed Smith Excellence in Wellbeing in Law Award (2022), awarded after an independent, national selection process by the Institute for Wellbeing in Law. A Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, she is an international keynote speaker and mindfulness teacher trainer with a particular emphasis on integrating mindfulness into everyday life in the face of the most vexing challenges of our times. She is a student of a range of Buddhist traditions and mindfulness masters, and is a lay teacher in the Peacemaker Order led by Upaya Zen Center founder Roshi Joan Halifax. She has served as an advisor to a range of leading mindfulness-based professional development organizations, including the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness, the Brown Mindfulness Center, the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, and the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.
Rhonda Magee was named one of Mindful Magazine’s Inaugural Twelve Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement in 2019. Rhonda’s award-winning book, The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness (Penguin RandomHouse TarcherPerigee: 2019; paperback edition 2021), was named one of the top ten books released for the year by the Greater Good Science Center, and received similar recognition by Psychology Today and the editors of Mindful.org. To learn more visit RhondaVMagee.com.
Rhonda Magee served on the Mind & Life Steering Council from Spring 2016 to Spring 2018.
