Dr. Baker is a postdoctoral scholar in the Human Affect and Pain Neuroscience Laboratory at Duke University, where she is focused on using brain and spine fMRI to examine neurobiological mechanisms of chronic pain. As a doctoral student, she conducted biobehavioral research on mindfulness as a treatment for chronic pain. Now, she aims to combine her pre- and post-doctoral training to improve chronic pain management through enhanced mechanistic understanding and development of mechanistically driven, multimodal interventions. Dr. Baker is especially interested in using psychedelic-assisted and mindfulness-based therapies to modify central pain networks, and in linking treatment responses to neuroimaging findings.
James N. Kirby, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer, Clinical Psychologist, and the Co-Director of the Compassionate Mind Research Group at the University of Queensland. He has broad research interests in compassion, but specifically examines factors that facilitate and inhibit compassionate responding. He also examines the clinical effectiveness of compassion focused interventions, specifically in how they help with self-criticism and shame that underpin many depression and anxiety disorders. James also holds a Visiting Fellowship at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. In 2022 he authored Choose Compassion, and in 2020 he co-edited Making an Impact on Mental Health. He serves as an Associate Editor for two international journals Mindfulness and Psychology & Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice.
As the fourth Dean of the historic Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel, the Reverend Dr. Bernard L. Richardson is the executive officer for religious affairs at Howard University. Dr. Richardson is perhaps most widely recognized by the University community and leaders across the nation for his prolific prayers and insightful spiritual guidance.
Dr. Richardson has set an example in affirming religious diversity and freedom both on campus and throughout the community. He has the distinction of being the first to officially establish a Muslim chaplaincy at a U.S. university. Dr. Richardson has built upon the Chapel’s social justice legacy by opening the Chapel to the interfaith leaders who birthed the Million Man March, welcoming anti-apartheid and religious leader Archbishop Desmund Tutu as a Chapel speaker, and hosting President William Clinton and the World AIDS Conference.
Under his leadership, Rankin Chapel is known as one of the most effective chapels in the nation. The Sunday service, a center of thought and leadership, reaches a worldwide broadcast audience of over one million. Generations of students cite the life-changing impact of Chapel initiatives instituted by Dr. Richardson including: Chapel Assistants, Alternative Spring Break (ASB), HU Day of Service, the Interfaith Advisory Board, Justice for Juveniles Prison Ministry and the University’s first Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School. After securing $2.5 million in funding from the Lilly Endowment establishing the Spiritual and Ethical Dimensions of Leadership initiative (SEDL), he launched a series of Learning Labs to produce spiritually sensitive leaders. He led the worship service for the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington honoring those who organized and marched. He twice hosted President Barak Obama’s White House Interfaith Community Service Campus Challenge with the first international delegations in 2015.
Dr. Richardson has advanced the connection between scholarship, spirituality and service. His impact was marked in 2015 by the White House with a place on the Higher Education Interfaith Community Service Honor Roll. This honor was largely due to the Alternative Spring Break program that Dr. Richardson developed in 1994. In 2006, he persuaded FEMA to grant permission for Howard students to serve following Hurricane Katrina, opening the door for other volunteers and leading to the recognition of the ASB students by ABC’s World News Tonight as their Persons of the Week. ASB has become Howard University’s flagship service-learning program that, through fundraising, is offered at no cost to students.
Certified as a Mindfulness Meditation Teacher and Koru Mindfulness Teacher, Dr. Richardson launched the Wellness Collective and the Howard University Mindfulness Training Initiative that are providing transformative support to the university community.
Dr. Richardson, a tenured Associate Professor at the Howard University School of Divinity, has made scholarly contributions in the areas of pastoral care and counseling. Among his distinguished lectures are the Parks/King Lecture at Yale University and the Indaba Revitalizing Social Work in South Africa. Dr. Richardson is an ordained minister in the A.M.E. Zion Church who has previously served as a pastor, counseling specialist, mental health therapist and faculty member at several institutions.
Dr. Richardson has earned a B.S., Sociology, Howard University; M. Div., Yale University Divinity School; M.A. and Ph.D., Michigan State University, and an honorary Doctor of Divinity, Carthage College.
His numerous honors include: Howard University 2018 Alumni Award for Distinguished Postgraduate Achievement in the field of Religion; Washington, DC Hall of Fame; MLK Jr. Board of Preachers of Morehouse College; DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities; Phi Delta Kappa Honor Society; National Institute of Mental Health Fellowship; Crystal Apple Outstanding Educator Award, Michigan State University; Special Citation of Achievement as orator for the 139th Opening Convocation of Howard University; Benjamin E. Mays Fellowship for Ministry; Perth Amboy High School Hall of Fame. He is a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.
Dr. Anglin is a methodologist who develops data science and natural language processing-based methods for understanding educational processes. Her most recent research develops automated methods for efficiently monitoring program implementation in impact evaluations, as well as methods for improving the causal validity and replicability of impact estimates. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, Prevention Science, AERA Open, and Evaluation Review. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, where she participated in the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) Pre-doctoral Training Program and received an NAEd/Spencer dissertation fellowship.
Soham Rej completed medical school (2009) and psychiatry residency at McGill (2014), followed by a geriatric psychiatry clinical and research fellowship at the University of Toronto (2017). He is a Geriatric Psychiatrist and Assistant Professor at the Jewish General Hospital/Lady Davis Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Canada since 2017.
As of Dec 2022, he has 135 peer-reviewed publications, $2.1M in peer-reviewed research funding (CIHR, FRQS, etc.) and $2.1M in charitable, corporate, and governmental funding. He has mentored more than 80 graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, psychiatry residents, and other trainees.
Soham’s Geri-PARTy lab has 12-15 full-time staff, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students and investigates clinical trials to improve mood, anxiety, and cognitive disorders in older adults, with three foci:
- Mind-body Interventions (Mindfulness, various forms of Meditation, Tai Chi, Yoga, Exercise, Health Education)
- Technology-Assisted Behavioral Interventions with a Human Touch (Virtual Reality, Zoom, Telehealth, Robots), working closely with Community Partners
- Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy (Ketamine, Psilocybin)
Perhaps of particular relevance to Mind and Life, is Soham’s growing collaboration with neuroscientists, social scientists, and monastics/meditators to 1) examine the phenomenology and biology of deep meditative/contemplative states and 2) encourage a deep, growing dialogue between deep contemplative practitioners and scientists.
Christine Lathren, MD, MSPH, is a research assistant professor within the Program on Integrative Medicine, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research explores how self-compassion may strengthen relationship health and improve well-being outcomes, particularly in family caregiving and parent-child contexts. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, she is interested in adapting self-compassion interventions and their implementation to be maximally feasible, acceptable and beneficial for diverse families.
Ann Masten, Ph.D., is a Regents Professor, Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development and Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the Institute of Child Development in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota.
Masten studies competence, risk, and resilience in development, with a focus on the processes leading to positive adaptation and outcomes in children and families whose lives are threatened by adversity. The goal of her work is to inform science, practice, and policy seeking to understand and promote human adaptation and resilience.
Masten directs the Project Competence Research on Risk and Resilience (PCR3), which includes studies of normative populations and high-risk young people exposed to war, natural disasters, poverty, homelessness, and migration.
Masten’s research in Minnesota has focused on school success in homeless and other disadvantaged mobile children, with a focus on malleable protective processes, including parenting and self-regulation skills.
At the national and international level, Masten works with colleagues in multiple disciplines to understand adaptation and development, particularly in relation to migration, disasters, and war.
Bassam Khoury is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational & Counselling Psychology at McGill University, and he heads the McGill Mindfulness Research Lab (https://mcgill.ca/mmrl/), where he and his team conduct research on advancing the theory, research, and applications of mindfulness and compassion. The global aim of the research is to make a deep lasting change on both individuals and societies by embracing new ways of interacting with oneself, other people, and the natural environment including animals through the practices of mindfulness and compassion. Prof. Khoury published numerous papers on mindfulness and compassion in leading journals in the domains of clinical psychology and physical/medical health. His work (59-papers and 5 book-chapters) has gained international recognition, was cited over than 5500 times and was selected by the University of Cambridge’s Insights for Impact Report; a report published by the department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge citing the most impactful research papers in psychology worldwide. Furthermore, his work was ranked 67th worldwide on Web of Science in the category of clinical psychology. Dr. Khoury have also been recognized through multiple awards and nominations, including the Association of Psychological Science Emerging Scholars Rising Stars Award, and William Dawson Scholars Award.
Ryan Herringa, MD, PhD is the Director of the Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and the UW Health Professor in Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. He is a pediatric psychiatrist and neuroscientist whose work explores the neurobehavioral substrates of childhood traumatic stress and PTSD. He directs the BRAVE Research Center (Building Resilience to Adversity and Violent Experiences), which seeks to develop neuroscience-informed treatments for youth to enhance resilience and recovery. Specifically, the BRAVE Lab uses neuroimaging combined with behavioral, physiological, and genetic approaches to develop biomarkers of vulnerability, recovery, and resilience to childhood trauma. Dr. Herringa serves as the principal or co-investigator on several NIH funded research studies examining neural mechanisms of trauma and PTSD in both youth and adult populations. In addition to his research, Dr. Herringa remains active in clinical care and teaching, with specialization in the treatment of youth with trauma-related mental illness.
Dr. Herringa earned his MD and a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin – Madison as part of the Medical Scientist Training Program. He completed general psychiatry residency and a child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, and is board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) and member of the Society of Biological Psychiatry and American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. His work has been funded by AACAP, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and the NIH.
