After graduating from the University of California–Berkeley in mathematics and cognitive science, Peter Grossenbacher’s doctorate at the University of Oregon in experimental psychology focused on human electrophysiology and attention. His book, “Finding Consciousness in the Brain: A Neurocognitive Approach,” offers insights into the brain’s involvement in conscious experience. After researching multisensory attention and synesthesia at the University of Cambridge and the National Institute of Mental Health, he joined the Naropa faculty in 2000. A meditator
since 1980, his research focuses on information processing during meditation, meditative development and contemplative teaching. He trains scientists and educational professionals across a variety of settings in mindfulness-based pedagogies that support awareness, facilitate inclusion and foster community.
Tania Singer is a professor of social neuroscience and psychology and heads the Max Planck Society’s Social Neuroscience Lab in Berlin, Germany. After her PhD in psychology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development in 2000, she worked at the Wellcome Centre for Imaging Neuroscience, at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London, and held the inaugural Chair of Social Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics at the University of Zürich. She is a world expert on compassion and empathy, and has a passion for creating bridges between fields that typically never interact. Her research focus is on the hormonal, neuronal, and developmental basis of human sociality, empathy, and compassion, and their malleability through mental training. She has initiated and headed one of the largest meditation-based secular mental training studies on compassion, the ReSource project. Linking such findings to the field of (neuro)economics, she developed a Caring Economics approach, developing new models of economy based on care and social cohesion. She is also heading the CovSocial project, a large-scale study on stress, resilience and social cohesion in Berliners during the corona crisis. Presently, she works on the Edu:Social project aiming at bringing partner-based mental training formats, so-called Dyads, into education and health-care settings to boost resilience and social competencies. Tania Singer is the author of more than 160 scientific articles (e.g., Science, Nature) and book chapters and edited together with Matthieu Ricard the two books Caring Economics (2015) and Power and Care (2019), based on two Mind and Life conferences with His Holiness the Dalai Lama she helped organize. She served on the Mind & Life Board of Directors from 2012 to 2018 and was co-founder of Mind and Life Europe. Throughout her life she has explored how inner change can bring about societal change putting science in the service of societal transformation.
Tania Singer served on the Mind & Life Board of Directors from 2012 to 2018.
David Sbarra, PhD, is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona where he directs the Laboratory for Social Connectedness and Health. His research focuses on understanding why close relationships are so important for health as well as the psychological and biological consequences of ending relationships. He is the author of over 70 scientific research papers on these topics and has received grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. In 2014, David received the prestigious Herbert Weiner Early Career Award from the American Psychosomatic Society in recognition of his contributions to the study of close relationships and health. David earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and completed his clinical residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University. He is a member and Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and a member of the International Association of Relationship Research (IARR), the American Psychosomatic Society (APS), and the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR). In addition, he currently serves as President of the Academy of Psychological Clinical Science (APCS). David is a clinical psychologist by training, maintains a private psychotherapy practice in Tucson, and currently serves as Director of Clinical Training at the University of Arizona, where he teaches a graduate course in advanced cognitive behavioral therapy. Dr. Sbarra’s new e-book is “Love, Loss, and the Space Between: The Relationship Expert Essays.”
Pete Fleming leads the Protect and Care Research team at Facebook. His team is responsible for studying social interactions and developing products to make Facebook a safer and more supportive place for people to connect with others. He oversees Facebook research projects that focus on social connectivity including, for example, emotional responses, gratitude, social support and bullying. Prior to joining Facebook, Pete was a Research Director at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Invest in Knowledge, a nonprofit working in Sub-Saharan Africa to provide research services while building local research capacity. At the University of Pennsylvania he directed NIH grants studying social networks and health in Sub-Saharan Africa that were led by investigators from a sociology, psychology, demography, anthropology, medicine and public health. He has become an expert in team-building and facilitating collaboration between researchers from different disciplines, in academia and in industry, and how to conduct better science through collaboration.
James Coan, PhD (CoInvestigator) is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. His work seeks to uncover the neural mechanisms of emotion and social behavior, with an emphasis on neural systems mediating known links between social relationships and improved health. Dr. Coan’s work has been featured in Science, Nature, the New York Times, Time Magazine, NPR, the Today Show and other major media outlets. Dr. Coan received the inaugural Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science, and the Award for Distinguished Early Career Contributions from the Society for Psychophysiological Research.
Evan Thompson is a writer and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he is also an Associate Member of the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Psychology (Cognitive Science). He works on the nature of the mind, the self, and human experience. His work combines cognitive science, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Asian philosophical traditions.
He is the author of Why I Am Not a Buddhist (Yale University Press, 2020); Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy (Columbia University Press 2015); Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007); and Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception (Routledge Press, 1995). He is the co-author, with Francisco J. Varela and Eleanor Rosch, of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991; revised edition 2016).
He is currently working on two new books: Dying: Our Ultimate Transformation (Columbia University Press), and with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, The Blind Spot: Experience, Science, and the Search for Reality (MIT Press). Thompson is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Past President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association.
Evan is featured in the Mind & Life podcast episode: Expanding Our View of the Mind.
Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta is Professor of Psychology and the Director of Faculty Equity and Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Her research is on implicit bias. Whereas past work had assumed that implicit bias is learned early in life and difficult to change, her research shows that such bias can be changed given the right social context. Recently, her work focuses on how implicit gender bias about science and engineering shakes the confidence of women and students of color in STEM. She identifies learning environments that foster social connection, inoculates students against negative stereotypes, and promotes their confidence, persistence and success in STEM. This work has been supported by grants from the NSF and NIH. She spends a good bit of time disseminating this research to broad audiences including K-12 teachers and administrators, university faculty and campus leaders, tech entrepreneurs, federal and state policy-makers, lawyers, judges, and legal scholars.
Helen Y. Weng, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, and her research focuses on the neural mechanisms of how meditation practices may improve social behavior and mental health. Her current work involves adapting research methodology to increase diverse representation in the neuroscience of meditation from a social justice perspective. This includes using community engagement with a diverse sangha (the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, CA) to adopt culturally-sensitive research procedures for people of color, the LGBTQIA+ population, people with disabilities, the fat community, and people with lower income. In addition, she has designed the EMBODY Task, a novel functional MRI task which uses machine learning approaches to assess diverse and fluctuating mental states during meditation. Neural patterns are individually tailored to each meditator, and thus allow for greater neural and psychological diversity within and across meditators, while providing novel metrics of attention such as percent time focused on bodily sensations. Dr. Weng’s doctoral work from the Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison demonstrated that compassion meditation may increase both altruistic and neural responses to suffering. This work was featured in the New York Times, BBC, and Fast Company. Dr. Weng’s clinical interests include integrating compassion and mindfulness meditation with psychotherapy to treat mood and anxiety disorders, particularly for LGBTQ clients.
Helen is the recipient of the 2019 Mind & Life Institute Annual Service Award.
Marisela Gomez is a community activist, author, public health professional, and physician. She received a BS and MS from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque; and a PhD, MD, and MPH from Johns Hopkins University. Of Afro-Latina ancestry, she has spent more than 20 years in Baltimore involved in social justice activism and community building/health research and practice. She is the author of the 2015 book Race, Class, Power, and Organizing in East Baltimore. A mindfulness practitioner in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, she facilitates mindfulness retreats for activists and people of color. She blogs at HuffPost and marsielabgomez.com on the intersection of wisdom, justice, and mindfulness.
Find out more about her work here.
Bruce M. Knauft is Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, Atlanta. Author of eight books and numerous articles and chapters, Dr. Knauft has special interest in cultural diversity both globally and closer to home. This includes the social, cultural, and psychological construction of power, identity, and personhood in relation to inequality and discrimination or stigma, including in areas of gender, ethnicity, race, religion, nationality, and class.
Dr. Knauft conducted his original ethnographic fieldwork—on shamanism, spirituality, and sorcery—among the remote Gebusi people of the rainforest of Papua New Guinea’s Western Province, where he continues to do fieldwork. He has also conducted engaged intellectual and activist project work concerning post-conflict developments (supported by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation) in a dozen developing countries of east and west Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Altai-Himalayas.
During the past decade, Dr. Knauft has developed increasing interest, as both a scholar and a practitioner, in Tibetan Buddhism, meditation, and mindfulness—both in Himalayan countries and in dharma centers in the U.S. and Canada. He also continues scholarship in areas of general anthropology, including theoretical developments concerning political economy, culture, and subjectivity. His most recent articles consider issues in Tibetan Buddhist tantra and current political developments in the U.S. His most recent books are “Mongolians After Socialism: Politics, Economy, Religion” (Co-edited, 2012) and “The Gebusi: Lives Transformed in a Rainforest World” (2016).
