Pamela Seigle, MS, is the executive director of Courage & Renewal Northeast at Wellesley College, an affiliate of the national Center for Courage & Renewal. She coleads the national Courage in Schools Initiative for the Center for Courage & Renewal, developing programs that bring reflective practice and focus on adult community directly to schools. She is the founder of the Open Circle® Program based at the Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College. Open Circle is a leading provider of evidence-based curriculum and professional development for SEL in kindergarten through grade five. Since its inception in 1987, Open Circle has reached more than two million students and trained more than 13,000 educators. She is currently a trustee of the Conservatory Lab Charter School, a music-infused elementary school in Boston that has implemented El Sistema as a whole-school initiative, and a former trustee of the Boston Public Library. She received her bachelor of science and master of science degrees from Syracuse University.

June Rimmer, EdD, joined CEL in 2011 as an associate director. In this role, she develops and manages district partnerships committed to building leaders’ expertise in instructional leadership and to transforming central office. Prior to joining the CEL team, she served in numerous leadership roles in urban education settings, most recently as chief academic officer in Seattle. Before coming to CEL, she served as a program director with the Stupski Foundation in San Francisco, coaching and providing technical assistance to urban district leaders committed to reform. She was also part of a research team examining powerful student learning experiences that lead to 21st-century skills and competence as well the system-level change needed at both the district and state levels to support 21st-century learning. Her professional interests lie in the design of equity-based instructional systems, and building expertise in educators’ practice to ensure that all students — particularly our most vulnerable children — exit our systems able to thrive in our dynamic, interconnected, global community.

Maria Pacheco, EdD, is the executive director of The Education Alliance at Brown University, a support organization that provides services to states and schools nationwide. She is also the director of the New England Equity Assistance Center, and adjunct assistant professor of ESL and cross-cultural studies at Brown University. As a researcher, teacher, and program director, she has worked extensively in the areas of English language learners, civil rights, equity pedagogy, second language acquisition, and minority parent and community engagement. She has more than 30 years of experience addressing issues of cultural diversity in urban schools and higher education. As a practitioner/scholar, she has authored and coauthored multiple publications, proposals, and reports on bilingualism, second language acquisition, culture and learning, and equitable instructional practices.

Ryan Stagg is a Digital Strategist with the Mind & Life Institute. He has an MA in Contemplative Religious Studies and brings years of experience in digital marketing and business strategy within the nonprofit sector. He currently lives in Lake Arrowhead, CA.

Arianna Huffington is the chair, president, and editor-in-chief of the Huffington
Post Media Group, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of 13 books. In May of 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that quickly became one of the most widely read, linked to, and frequently cited media brands on the Internet. In 2012, the site won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. In 2013, she was named to the Forbes Most Powerful Women list. In 2006, and again in 2011, she was named to the TIME 100, TIME magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was 16, and graduated from Cambridge University with a master’s in economics. At 21, she became president of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union. She serves on several boards, including EL PAIS, PRISA, the Center for Public Integrity, and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Her 14th book, The Success Myth: The Third Metric Beyond Money and Power, was published by Crown in March of 2014.

Sheryl Petty, EdD, is a principal associate at the Annenberg Institute for School
Reform at Brown University, a national educational equity and systems change consultant, and an associate consultant with Movement Strategy Center (Oakland, California) and Management Assistance Group (Washington, D.C.). She is lead designer for the Transforming Education Systems Alliance (TESA), which focuses on promoting aligned approaches to democratic education across sectors including policy, practice, community organizing, educator preparation and development, research, messaging, framing and communications, capacity building, standards and curriculum, and assessment. A fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, she served as executive director of California Tomorrow — a research, advocacy, and training nonprofit specializing in strategies that foster equity and inclusion across the pre-kindergarten to community college (preK-14) spectrum, and managed the equity and community engagement approaches at the Stupski Foundation. She holds a bachelor of arts in mathematics, a master’s in systematic and philosophical theology, and a doctorate of education in educational leadership and change. Her expertise includes equity-driven change process facilitation, strategic visioning and analysis, coaching, and fostering collaborative relationships for the improvement of our collective life.

Edward Slingerland, PhD, is a professor of Asian studies and the Canada
research chair in Chinese thought and embodied cognition at the University of British Columbia, where he also holds adjunct appointments in philosophy and psychology. His research specialties and teaching interests include “warring states”; Chinese thought; religious studies (comparative religion, cognitive science, and evolution of religion); cognitive linguistics (blending and conceptual metaphor theory); ethics (virtue ethics and moral psychology); and the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences. His publications include Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (Oxford 2003), The Analects of Confucius (Hackett 2003), What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body &
Culture (Cambridge 2008), and Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and Humanities (coedited with Mark Collard; Oxford, 2012), as well as more than 20 referred articles in top journals in a wide variety of fields. He is currently PI on a large Canadian government grant on “The Evolution of Religion and Morality,” and director of the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) and the Database of Religious History (DRH). His latest work — a trade book entitled Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity (Crown/Random House), which integrates ancient Chinese and modern scientific understandings of spontaneity — was published in March of 2014.

Shawn Clement is a Salesforce & IT Consultant for the Mind & Life Institute. Shawn worked full-time at the Mind & Life Institute from 2018 to mid-2019 on the Advancement and IT teams, prior to moving to DC to work with a Jewish non-profit. He received his masters in Higher Education from the University of Virginia and BA in Special Education from Winthrop University. Shawn enjoys learning new things, playing video games, and exploring new cities.

Phil Walker is a Creative Content Producer at the Mind & Life Institute. Phil is a filmmaker and producer from Atlanta with a BA in Media Arts from the University of South Carolina. He worked at Georgia Tech in Communications for eight years where he produced global media projects in partnership with the Carter Center and the United Nations. In 1998, Phil started his own production company and made several feature documentaries and numerous short films presented on PBS and other outlets. Awards include a regional Emmy Award (1995), the Kodak Vision Award (Slamdance Film Festival 2010) and a THEA award (2016).