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.
