Yotam Heineberg, PsyD, earned his doctorate at the PGSP-Stanford consortium at Palo Alto University. His research focused on the cycle of
violence, trauma, and aggression, which led him to seek out solutions to address these fundamental human problems through the vehicle of compassion. He went on to pursue post-doctoral training at Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism, Research, and Education (CCARE) where he now serves as a Research Fellow. Yotam trained in Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) with Professor Paul Gilbert, who developed the approach in the UK, and collaborates with the Compassionate Mind Foundation. As clinical faculty at Palo Alto University’s Gronowski Center, he offers supervision, clinical, and didactic trainings in CFT as well as other compassion-focused approaches to health and healing. His other professional interests entail developing relational, compassion-focused online interventions for both clinical and non-clinical populations.
Cade McCall, PhD, is a group leader in the Social Neuroscience Department of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. He studies human affect and cognition with a particular focus on social interaction. McCall uses virtual environments, digital motion tracking and autonomic measurement to study psychological processes implicitly and in the midst of immersive experiences.
Willa Blythe Baker, PhD, is the Founder and Spiritual Director of Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston, MA and its retreat center Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in Springfield, NH. She was authorized as a dharma teacher (lama) and lineage holder in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism after twelve years of monastic training and two consecutive three-year retreats. At present, Willa writes, teaches and guides meditation retreats for lay Buddhists interested in cultivating a deep meditation practice in daily life. Her teaching interests include contemplative ecology, embodied non-dual awareness and compassion. She is the author of several books including, most recently, The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom.
Willa was featured in the Mind & Life podcast episode Meditating with the body.
David M. Fresco, PhD, is Professor of Psychological Sciences at Kent State University and Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He directs the Psychopathology and Emotion Regulation Laboratory (PERL) and is a co-director of the Kent Electrophysiological Neuroimaging Laboratory (KENL). He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Temple University. His program of research adopts an affective science perspective to the study of anxiety and mood disorders. Working at the interface of cognitive behavioral and emotion regulation approaches, he conducts survey, experimental, and treatment research to examine factors associated with major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) including metacognitive factors (e.g., explanatory flexibility, decentering, rumination, worry), peripheral psychophysiology, and emerging work from affective neuroscience, utilizing neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques. Another focus of the PERL lab is the development of treatments informed by affective and contemplative neuroscience findings that incorporate mindfulness meditation and other
practices derived from Buddhist mental training exercises. Much of his NIH-funded treatment research has focused on the infusion of mindfulness into Western psychosocial treatments.
Bronwyn Finnigan, PhD, is a continuing lecturer and Deputy Head of the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University (ANU). She works in philosophy of action, ethics, and epistemology in Western and Asian philosophical traditions. Her current research focuses on the nature and function of rationality (and related notions of intentionality, subjectivity and normativity) in agency and ethical agency. She is particularly interested in skilled action and non-deliberative or unreflective modes of ethical agency. Bronwyn has a BA (University of Melbourne), MA (University of Sydney) in philosophy and completed her PhD (University of Auckland) in 2012 with Rosalind Hursthouse and John Bishop. She has studied Indian and Tibetan Buddhist thought in India, Nepal, USA, Switzerland and Japan. She co-authored Moonshadows: Conventional Truth and Buddhist Philosophy (Cowherds, Oxford University Press, 2011), which focuses on issues of metaphysics, theories of truth, justification and ethics in Madhyamaka Buddhism. She has published articles on the nature of action and ethical agency that emerge from recent engagements with Indian Pramānāvāda, Classical Chinese Confucianism and Daoism; on meta-ethical problems that arise when Buddhist ethics is contextualized in Pramānāvāda epistemology and a forthcoming article that investigates moral justification in the context of Prāsangika Madhyamaka. She has also co-authored a book chapter on spontaneous action in martial arts, which engaged the Japanese Zen Buddhist views of Takuan.
