Lobsang Tenzin Negi, PhD, is the founder and director of Drepung Loseling Monastery, Inc., in Atlanta, GA, and a Senior Lecturer in Emory University’s Department of Religion. He also serves as director of the Emory-Tibet Partnership, a multi dimensional initiative founded in 1998 to bring together the foremost contributions of the Western scholastic tradition and the Tibetan Buddhist sciences of mind and healing. In this capacity, he serves as co-director of both the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative and the Emory Collaborative for Contemplative Studies. He also developed Cognitively-Based Compassion Training, a compassion meditation program that is currently utilized in a number of research studies, including an NIH-funded study examining the efficacy of compassion meditation on the experience of depression.
Negi, a former monk, was born in Kinnaur, a small Himalayan kingdom adjoining Tibet. He began his monastic training at The Institute of Buddhist Dialectics and continued his education at Drepung Loseling Monastery in South India, where he received his Geshe Lharampa degree, the highest academic degree granted in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, in 1994. Negi completed his PhD at Emory University in 1999; his interdisciplinary dissertation centered on traditional Buddhist and contemporary Western approaches to emotions and their impact on wellness.
Krista is the Director of Grants & Events at the Mind & Life Institute. She has been with Mind & Life since June 1, 2018. She has held leadership positions with mission-driven transformative organizations and has an extensive background in managing programs, people, and events in higher education and for global organizations. Krista enjoys managing dynamic teams, and has a long-term interest and background in contemplative practice. And in her spare time she loves teaching creative dance to children and spending time in nature with her husband, son, and friends.
Francisco J. Varela (1946-2001) co-founded the Mind & Life Institute in 1987. Born in Chile, he received his PhD in Biology from Harvard University in 1970. Trained as a biologist, mathematician, and philosopher, he wrote and edited numerous books and journal articles on biology, neurology, cognitive science, mathematics, and philosophy. Francisco introduced the concept of autopoiesis to biology and supported embodied philosophy, viewing human cognition and consciousness in terms of the enactive structures in which they arise. His work popularized within the field of neuroscience the concept of neurophenomenology, which requires observers to examine their own conscious experience using scientifically verifiable methods. His book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991), co-authored with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, is considered a classic in the field of cognitive science, offering pioneering phenomenological connections and introducing the Buddhism-informed enactivist and embodied cognition approach. In 2004, Mind & Life launched the Francisco J. Varela Research Grants to support the examination of contemplative techniques and their application to reducing human suffering and promote flourishing.
