Erika Díaz-Almeyda is an Assistant Professor of Biology at California State University, San Marcos, where she leads her microbial ecology lab investigating relationships between microbes and their hosts, with a focus on restoration and agricultural applications. Her pedagogy actively integrates innovative teaching strategies and emphasizes working with undergraduate students as research collaborators. Her current research explores how agroecological systems impact soil microbial diversity and function. She emphasizes traditional ecological practices, integrating local stakeholder perspectives and collaborating with local communities to determine research priorities and support decision-making. She completed her Ph.D. in Biology at The Pennsylvania State University and was an NIH-FIRST fellow at Emory University. She is currently a Sci Comm Identities Project fellow (Metcalf Institute), where she focuses on the intersection of climate change and food-related issues, including food insecurity, and agriculture. She is also a Faculty Innovation Fellow at CSUSM (2024–2025), where she is developing the Milpa HUB—a research garden where she grows milpa and conducts experiments, sharing methods and celebrations related to milpa cultivation. The goal is to expand community access to this ancestral technology while connecting individuals already engaged in milpa-related work, including seed farmers and chefs.
Dr. Jyoti Mishra is an Associate Professor in the department of Psychiatry at the University of California San Diego. She is the founder and director of the NEATLabs and the Co-director of the University of California’s Climate Resilience Initiative. She also serves as a member of The Mind Body Ecology Institute Circle of Advisors. Jyoti has expertise in community-partnered studies of climate trauma and resilience as well as scalable digital mental health interventions and AI/ML enabled precision psychiatry. Her research has been funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, Hope for Depression Foundation, Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion, and the Mind & Life Institute among others. Her climate-related research is widely acknowledged in the media including features in the BBC, CNN, TIME magazine, NPR, Washington Post, World Economic forum, and Scientific American, and is also cited by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Jyoti believes that tough challenges for humanity such as climate change provide the opportunity for inter-generational activism towards a common positive vision for the future in harmony with nature, which can in turn stimulate inter-generational resilience.
Dennis Muñoz Vergara, DVM, MS, MPH is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and a mind-body movement therapies (MBMT) researcher. He is also a yoga instructor, a practice he has cultivated since he was pursuing a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree specializing in Animal Pathology in southern Chile. In 2016, he pursued a postdoctoral opportunity at Harvard Medical School (HMS), within the Osher Center’s Connective Tissue Laboratory. His research focuses on the effect of body stretching in acute and chronic myofascial inflammation. In 2017, he successfully applied to the NCCIH-funded T32 program (HMS Research Fellowship in Integrative Medicine). During this fellowship, he completed a program in Clinical Effectiveness and obtained an MPH degree from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His current research involves a translational pilot RCT examining the systemic inflammatory impact of a single bout of yogic exercise among yoga-naïve and sedentary adults. His long-term goal is to develop a clinical model for studying the intersection between the immune and myofascial systems and the benefits of yoga for health and disease. He loves to cook and dance with his husband, family, and friends. He also cultivates his writings of poetry and short stories with a group of Chilean writers and associates.
Lindsay Romano (she/her) is a third year PhD student at New York University. She studies how mindfulness- and compassion-based practices can be used as tools for social justice in education. Her work explores how the cultivation of cognitive and emotional capacities in educators (e.g., attention regulation, mindfulness, compassion) can influence positive social change in the classroom by addressing issues such as bias and dis/ability and racial injustices. Lindsay is a former high school Special Education teacher and plans to conduct her research in service of identifying practical and applicable mindfulness-based instructional strategies to share with school communities.
Dr. Matthew D. Sacchet, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Meditation Research Program at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Sacchet is an established expert in meditation and mental health research. His background includes leading teams to conduct innovative and complex studies, employing advanced research methods, studying meditation and mental health, and publishing in leading academic journals. Since 2012, he has authored over 85 publications, and his work has been presented over 125 times at international, national, regional, and local conferences and in speaker series, and cited over 5,000 times. He has received funding from primary federal funding bodies in the United States (including the National Science Foundation [NSF] and National Institutes of Health [NIH]), his work has been covered by major media (including CBS, NBC, NPR, Time, and The Wall Street Journal), and Forbes named him as one of its “30 Under 30.” Dr. Sacchet is an Associate Editor of the academic journal Mindfulness. He completed a self-designed bachelor’s degree in Contemplative Studies (uniting meditation and neuroscience) at Brown University and was then research staff at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Tübingen, before completing a Ph.D. and postdoctoral position at Stanford University. Prior to joining Mass General in May 2022, Dr. Sacchet was faculty and a director of research at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Shufang Sun is an Assistant Professor at Brown University School of Public Health. Her research focuses on addressing minority stress and mental health among marginalized communities through innovative, evidence-based methods, particularly via mHealth and mindfulness. Specific to mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs), her work has primarily focused on using systematic review and meta-analytic methods to understand the effectiveness of MBIs across various populations, as well as the utility of MBI for disease prevention and management. With various NIH grants support, her work has concerned racial, sexual, and gender minorities in the U.S. and globally. Dr. Sun is a meditation practitioner and licensed psychologist.
Dr Sam Roberts is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. His educational and research background is multi-disciplinary, including a Bachelor’s degree in Human Sciences from the University of Oxford, a Master’s degree in Evolutionary Psychology and a PhD which focused on primate social cognition. Building on this diverse background, his research focuses on communication and social relationships in both primates and humans. Because humans are social animals, the nature of our social ties is an important determinant of both our physical health and mental well-being. Dr Roberts’ research thus focuses on people’s social networks – the set of relationships they have with family and friends. He examines how communication patterns relate to these social relationships, how they change over time and how they are related to well-being. As online interaction has become increasingly important in forming and maintaining relationships, he is also studying how using social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram affect both social networks and well-being. He has conducted longitudinal studies tracking how social networks change over time and used ‘big data’ from mobile phone communication to examine how fine-grained patterns of communication are associated with changes in people’s social networks.
John Edwards is Psychology Professor and Associate Dean at Oregon State University. He is co-founder and Director of Oregon State University’s Contemplative Studies Initiative, which has been in existence since 2008. In this role, he has organized and led many meditation-related events. His training is in Social/Personality psychology, with research interests in the broad areas of social cognition and attribution. His broad interests are in the ways in which personality and motivation impact social information processing with a particular focus on effects of uncertainty and control motivation on human functioning. He has done a great deal of work on causal uncertainty, which are feelings of uncertainty that one understands the causes of events. He has been increasingly focused on intersections between Buddhist philosophy and scientific theories of social cognition, and on the mechanisms by which different meditation types affect people. He has had funding from the National Science Foundation and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, among other sources. He is a Fellow of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.
I am an inclusive education and developmental psychology practitioner and currently engaged as a Project Manager with Ummeed Child Development Center, Mumbai, India. My work involves end-to-end project management and delivery, training, research, Monitoring & Evaluation, communications and advocacy towards establishing inclusive education systems within Indian schools. My work lies at the intersection of education, socio-emotional learning and mental health.
I hold a PhD in Education from the University of Cambridge, UK and my research critically examined systems and pedagogies in mainstream schools in India that ‘include all learners’ and consequently laid out a roadmap for implementing inclusive education in the Indian policy context. I have a MPhil in Social and Developmental Psychology (2012) from the Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge where my research focussed on autism and memory. Earlier I was working with the Centre for Sustainable Development, Earth Institute, Columbia University on scaling up educational innovations in primary schools in India across three districts.
I am both a research scholar and a social changemaker. I am particularly interested in educational philosophy, classroom pedagogy, and teacher professional development. My current work focuses on alternative purposes of education like learning to live together, education for social emotional learning, education of the heart and education of the spirit. I am particularly interested in classroom and school wide practices, systems and ethos, interventions and policies in the global south that bring about learning to live together. My previous work focused on cognitive development in children, while I still remain interested in exploring the links between social emotional learning and cognitive development.
I am also involved in grassroots level change in India and work on improving access to quality education (as the cofounder of two charities: Independent Thought & Social Action and Together In Development & Education Foundation) and for social emotional learning (as a consultant for multiple organizations). As the president of TIDE Foundation, I oversee several programs including direct education provision, teacher education and empowerment, school improvement, and development of self-directed learning materials. Furthermore, I have also served as an education and international development consultant supporting various Indian and global educational organizations.
