BENNETT M. SHAPIRO is a consultant in biotechnology. He was previously Executive Vice President, Worldwide Licensing and External Research, where he directed Merck’s research relationships with the academic and industrial biomedical research community. He joined Merck Research Laboratories in September of 1990 as Executive Vice President, Basic Research, Merck Research Laboratories. In this position he was responsible for all the basic and preclinical research activities at Merck worldwide. Earlier, he was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington. He is the author of over 120 papers on the molecular regulation of cellular behavior and the biochemical events that integrate the cascade of cellular activations at fertilization.

Shapiro received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Dickinson College and his doctor’s degree in medicine from Jefferson Medical College. Following an Internship in Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, he was a Research Associate at the NIH, then a Visiting Scientist at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and returned to the NIH as Chief Section on Cellular Differentiation in the Laboratory of Biochemistry, prior to joining the University of Washington. Dr. Shapiro has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and a Visiting Professor at the University of Nice.

Bennett Shapiro served on the Mind & Life Board of Directors from 2003 to 2016.

George Greenstein, PhD, is the Sidney Dillon Professor of Astronomy at Amherst College. He received his BS from Stanford and his PhD from Yale, both in physics. Initially his interests centered on research in theoretical astrophysics, but later they shifted to writing. He is the author of numerous works interpreting science for nonscientists. His first book, Frozen Star, was the recipient of two science-writing awards. In conjunction with Arthur Zajonc he is the author of a recent textbook titled The Quantum Challenge: Modern Research on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, which discusses the problems of interpretation posed by quantum mechanics. 

Prof. Dr. Anton Zeilinger’s work on the foundations of quantum physics has led both to concepts for a novel quantum information technology and to a new understanding of fundamental issues in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. His group’s achievements include quantum teleportation, entangled-state quantum cryptography, the first experimental realization of a one-way quantum computer and the world record for the largest molecules for which quantum interference has been shown. Among his distinctions are the German Order Pour le Mérite, the King Faisal International Prize in Science, the Sartorius Prize by the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen and honorary doctorates of the Humboldt University Berlin and Gdansk University in Poland. He is a member of the Austrian, the Berlin-Brandenburg, the Polish and the Slovak Academies of Science and of the German Leopoldina. Zeilinger is currently Professor at the Physics Department of Vienna University and at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Anne Treisman, PhD, is the James S. McDonnell Professor of Psychology at Princeton University. She received her BA from Cambridge University and her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. She has previously held positions at Oxford University, the University of British Columbia, a Fellowship at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a position at the University of California, Berkeley, and visiting positions at Bell Laboratories, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford and at the Russell Sage Foundation, New York. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, US, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society, and a William James Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

She received a number of prizes and honors including the Howard Crosby Warren award of the Society for Experimental Psychology, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the George A. Miller Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and honorary degrees from the University of British Columbia and University College London. She has published many papers on attention and visual memory, starting with selective listening and filter theory, and continuing with the binding problem in vision, and with studies of visual memory, both implicit and explicit.

Born in California in 1950, Alan Wallace began his studies of Tibetan Buddhism and the Tibetan language at the University of Göttingen, West Germany in 1970. He continued his studies for three years at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives and the Buddhist School of Dialects in Dharamsala, India. For a period of four years he studied, taught and interpreted for numerous Tibetan lamas at the Tibet Institute and the Centre for Higher Tibetan Studies, both in Switzerland. After a thirteen year absence from western academia, he earned his Bachelor’s Degree from Amherst College, summa cum laude, where, as an Independent Scholar, he researched the philosophical foundations of modern physics in light of Buddhist philosophy. He has translated and published several books on Tibetan Buddhism, language and medicine and is currently the spiritual director of Dharma Friendship Foundation in Seattle, Washington.

Alan Wallace served on the Mind & Life Board of Directors from 1990 to 2009.