Andrea Haidar is a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She is also a licensed clinical social worker and certified yoga teacher. Her research interests include culturally acceptable and accessible care for racial and ethnic minority communities, stress and resilience, mindfulness-based interventions, and immigrant and refugee mental health. Andrea’s work also seeks to examine and address health disparities among Arab, Middle Eastern, and North African communities. Prior to her doctoral studies, Andrea worked as a trilingual behavioral health specialist at a Federally Qualified Health Center, providing services in Arabic, Spanish, and English. She holds a master’s in social work and a bachelor’s in sociology from the University of Chicago. Andrea is also the recipient of national awards, including the Fulbright Scholarship, Truman Scholarship, and Critical Language Scholarship.
Dr. Rahil Rojiani (they/them) is a queer, genderfluid, South Asian Ismaili Muslim, and a fourth year psychiatry resident at Cambridge Health Alliance / Harvard Medical School. Rahil’s contemplative practices are informed by their Muslim faith, secular mindfulness traditions, and multiple Buddhist lineages, starting at Brown University where they majored in Contemplative Studies—a multi-disciplinary study of meditation, spirituality, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. Rahil has conducted several years of research on the neuroscience of meditation with Dr. Willoughby Britton at Brown University, and with Dr. Judson Brewer at Yale University and the Center for Mindfulness at UMass Worcester. They have also conducted research on the dual-brain neuroscience of drumming, and drumming as an intervention for incarcerated men. Rahil has been facilitating mindfulness and politicized healing groups since 2014, particularly for community organizers, healthcare professionals, and BIPOC communities (e.g., here). They are a graduate of Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach’s two-year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, and they currently serve on the Board of Directors for The Buddhist Peace Fellowship. Rahil is dedicated to using contemplative practices and somatic psychotherapies for healing trauma in oppressed communities working toward collective liberation.
Find out more about them here.
Natalie is the Advancement Associate at the Mind & Life Institute. She holds a BA in history from Randolph College, with minors in art history and museum studies, and a background in research and writing. She is new to the professional field of contemplative sciences but enjoys yoga and the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Natalie also enjoys photography, tending to her tiny garden, spending time with her dog and cat, and exploring historical sites with her fiance.
Carolyn studies how the human brain tracks and encodes information about its social environment and how this information shapes our thoughts and behavior. She received her B.Sc. from McGill University and her Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Dartmouth College before becoming an Assistant Professor at UCLA in 2016, where she is the Bernice Wenzel and Wendell Jeffrey Term Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and directs the Computational Social Neuroscience Lab.
Allison Leigh Holt is a neurodivergent artist using techniques of expanded cinema and the Light and Space Movement to model divergent epistemologies. A garage-academic and Fulbright scholar (Indonesia, 2009-10), she has earned numerous awards, exhibited, lectured, and been a resident artist/researcher internationally. Her film, Stitching the Future with Clues, was commissioned by The Ford Foundation Gallery for Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA; its script is published in Theater Magazine No. 52.2 (Yale School of Drama / Duke University Press). She is a compulsive gardener.
Quinn Conklin (she/her) is a Post-doctoral Scholar at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain where she leads the Contemplative Coping During Covid-19 project. Quinn has been a member of the Saron lab since 2013, where completed her dissertation investigating the effects of a month-long, silent, residential, Insight Meditation retreat on biomarkers of stress, inflammation, cellular aging, and social affiliation. She is interested in the biological and relational consequences of adversity and trauma, and the use of contemplative practices to facilitate healing.
Vaishali Mamgain is an Associate Professor of Economics and the Director of the Bertha Crosley Ball Center for Compassion at the University of Southern Maine. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; her past research focused on the contributions of (im)migrants and refugees in the Maine economy; her current research is in contemplative pedagogy. A leader in the field of contemplative education, she is passionate about deconstructing epistemology and “decolonizing” contemplative practices to help educators create a more inclusive, creative, and joyful learning environment.
She also facilitates compassion training and anti-oppression workshops for corporate and nonprofit organizations in the US and abroad, specializing in somatic and immersive nature training to undo (internalized) oppression, and help vision different, more equitable, loving societies. She serves on the Board of Directors of CMind: The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, and is a frequent contributor to programming. She is also faculty and Board member of the Courage of Care Coalition where, with others, she designs and facilitates trauma informed courses to resource participants especially global majority (aka BIPOC) and climate justice activists.
A working contemplative, she has meditated, wandered and ‘retreat’ed for many years. In 2017, she completed a three year meditation retreat at Samten Ling Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado and now lives on a beautiful island in Maine where she enjoys swimming in the sea, admiring seaweed, running, hiking, singing, and cooking.
Dr. Inger Burnett-Zeigler is a licensed clinical psychologist and associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. She has two decades of clinical experience helping people with stress, trauma, mood and anxiety conditions, and difficulty in interpersonal relationships. In her clinical practice she promotes holistic wellness through mindfulness, self-compassion and healthy behavior change. Inger’s scholarly work focuses on the role that social determinants of health play in mental illness and treatment, particularly in the Black community. She is the author of the book Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen: The Emotional Lives of Black Women. She has written dozens of articles and other publications on mental health in the Black community and lectures widely on barriers to access and engagement in mental health treatment, mindfulness and strategies to improve mental health outcomes and participation in treatment. Inger is an advocate for normalizing participation in mental health treatment and ensuring that all individuals have access to high-quality, evidence-based mental health care. She is an active contributor to the public discourse on mental health and she has been featured in the New York Times, TIME Magazine, and Chicago Tribune. Inger received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Cornell University, her doctorate in clinical psychology from Northwestern University, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the VA Ann Arbor/University of Michigan. She lives in Chicago.
Dr. Kedrick B. Perry is the Vice President for Equity and Inclusion in the Office of Equity and Inclusion at Loyola University New Orleans where he provides strategic guidance and serves as a thought leader and partner supporting all campus constituencies in achieving inclusive excellence throughout the institution. Before Loyola, Dr. Perry was head of diversity and outreach in the National Science Foundation’s Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science and executive director of the Grand Challenges Scholars Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he was director of the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program at Suffolk University in Boston, where he prepared underrepresented, first-generation, and limited-income undergraduate students for graduate study. Prior to that position, he worked in the Office of Graduate Student Diversity Programs at the University of Virginia where he was committed to the recruitment, retention, mentoring, and graduation of a highly talented and diverse graduate student population. He received his doctorate in higher education from the University of Virginia where he studied the effects of mentoring on underrepresented students. Dr. Perry also holds a Master of Public Administration and a graduate certificate in nonprofit management from North Carolina State University and a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
