john a. powell is Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute and Professor of Law, African American, and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously the Executive Director at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the Ohio State University, and prior to that, the founder and director of the Institute for Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. john formerly served as the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He is a co-founder of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and serves on the boards of several national and international organizations. john led the development of an “opportunity-based” model that connects affordable housing to education, health, health care, and employment and is well-known for his work developing the frameworks of “targeted universalism” and “othering and belonging” to effect equity-based interventions. john has taught at numerous law schools including Harvard and Columbia University. His latest book is Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.

john was featured in the Mind & Life podcast episode Othering and belonging.

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor at Stanford University, in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural, and the world of psychosis. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007. When God Talks Back was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. It was awarded the $100,000 Grawemeyer Prize for Religion. She has published over 30 op-eds in The New York Times, and her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Science News, and many other publications. Her new book, Our Most Troubling Madness: Schizophrenia and Culture, was published by the University of California Press in October 2016.

Tanya was featured in the Mind & Life podcast episode How social worlds shape our minds.

Yoona Kang’s research investigates psychological and neural mechanisms that support the development and changes in social cognition, emotions, and health outcomes. Her main research interests are in 1) linking social cognitive and affective processing in the brain to health outcomes across various developmental stages, and 2) designing intervention strategies that guide adaptive changes in social processing to promote emotional and physical well-being. Yoona’s work draws conceptual and methodological tools from psychology, cognitive neuroscience, contemplative science, and health communication. She examines converging evidence across a wide range of tools, including first-person reports, implicit measures, behavioral outcomes, and neuroimaging data (fMRI, fNIRS, EEG). Yoona received her B.A. in psychology from UCLA and Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University.

Dr. Chang is a licensed clinical psychologist and Associate Professor in the NYU Silver School of Social Work. Her research seeks to advance the well-being of BIPOC communities by understanding the processes that impact psychological health, identifying strategies for improving intergroup relationships, and developing culturally-grounded interventions that integrate mindfulness and other contemplative traditions to promote racial equity. She is the recipient of a Mind and Life PEACE grant to develop and evaluate Mindfulness-Based Critical Consciousness Training for teachers (MBCC-T) in New York City to strengthen their culturally-responsive teaching practice. A second-generation Chinese American, Dr. Chang also conducts research on key issues facing Asian American communities, most recently examining Asian Americans’ experiences of discrimination since the Covid-19 pandemic, and the role that critical consciousness, solidarity and allyship with other BIPOC communities may play in promoting more resilient coping with structural racism. Her research has been profiled on ABC News, CNN, 20/20, NPR and the New York Times. She is a founding member and Executive Board member of the International Society for Contemplative Research. Dr. Chang also maintains a private practice in New York City through the Soho CBT + Mindfulness Center.
Learn more about her work here.

Doris was featured on the Mind & Life podcast episode Critical Consciousness.

Amit Bernstein  (Co-Chair), PhD, is a Professor of Psychology, Director of the Observing Minds Lab at the University of Haifa, and member of the Israel Young Academy. Amit is interested in how wellbeing and suffering are impacted by the ways in which we process, experience and respond to our internal states, and thereby, how mindfulness and mental training may be used therapeutically.His team is currently studying the nature and function of attention in mental health, the salutary and curative properties and mechanisms of mindfulness, and the therapeutic translation of this work to care for vulnerable refugee populations. In his most important and rewarding job, he is Yonatan’s, Noga’s and Mia’s father.Amit is a Mind & Life Fellow and served as faculty for SRI 2019.

After graduating on General and Comparative Literature, I completed my PhD on the literary expressions of contemplative practice, studying how philosophical and psychological influences from Hindu and Buddhist practices become written works in contemporary authors.
I completed my studies with a Postgraduate Diploma in Buddhist Studies from South Wales University (UK) and a Postgraduate Course on Mindfulness-based Interventions at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). I am currently completing another postgraduate course from the University of the Witwatersrand on Higher Education. This is the framework in which I developed the pilot program that is at the base of this Varela grant research project.

In 2014, I decided to explore the application of contemplative practice into the corporate and educational environment. For the first role, I founded Veluvana, an online platform to teach mindfulness in Spanish. For the second role, I trained as a certified ‘b program’ facilitator (Mindfulness in Schools Project) and co-created MindEdu, to implement mindfulness practices in Education.

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel is an author and ordained Zen priest. The essence of all her transmissions come together in her teachings including these books, “Sanctuary: A Meditation on Home, Homelessness, and Belonging,” “The Way of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality, and Gender” (print and audio), and “Black Angel Cards: 36 Oracles and Messages for Divining Your Life.” She is a contributing author to many anthologies, including “Dharma, Color, Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism” and “Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women.” Her work has been featured in “Essence,” CNN, CBS News, “Buddhadharma,” and “Lion’s Roar.” She holds an M.A. from UCLA and a Ph.D. in transformative learning from the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Lawrence Barsalou is professor of psychology at the University of Glasgow in the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology. He received a B.A. in psychology from the University of California, San Diego, in 1977 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University in 1981. Since then, Barsalou has held faculty positions at Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago, joining the University of Glasgow in 2015. Barsalou’s research addresses the nature of human conceptual processing and its roles in perception, memory, language, thought, social interaction, health cognition, and contemplative processes. A central theme of his research is that the cognition is grounded in multimodal simulation, situated action, and embodiment. His current research focuses on understanding health behaviors from the perspective of grounded cognition, including habits, stress, and eating.

The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi is the founding director of The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Born into a Hindu Brahmin family in Vaishali, India, he chose his own path at the age of 10, entering a Buddhist monastery in Rajgir. His unique upbringing combined a modern secular education with traditional Buddhist training and ordination by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He earned his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude as an integral honors scholar, and completed his graduate studies in comparative philosophy of religion at Harvard University in 2003. Living in the United States as a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT, he was struck by the absence of ethics in our education. When the global financial crisis of 2008 brought new focus to that absence, he began programs to spark a conversation about ethics among MIT students. From that start, The Center was born. Since then, it has grown quickly into a collaborative think tank with global reach, engaging MIT faculty and leaders in science, engineering, business, and governance. He is the founding president of the Prajnopaya Foundation, a worldwide humanitarian organization developing innovative health, education, and social welfare programs. He serves on the board of several academic, humanitarian, and religious organizations, and teaches Buddhist philosophy and practice through the Prajnopaya Institute.