Dr. Ed Taylor is vice provost and dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs at the University of Washington where he oversees educational opportunities that advance and deepen the undergraduate academic experience. A professor in the College of Education, his research interests include the moral dimensions of education, leadership in education and social justice. His Ph.D. is from the UW.
Neil Dalal is Associate Professor of South Asian Philosophy and Religious Thought at the University of Alberta, where he teaches in both the Philosophy Department and the Religious Studies Program. His research explores philosophy of mind, contemplative psychologies, and meditation practices found in classical South Asian Yoga systems. He grounds this research in classical Sanskrit texts and commentaries as well as their living traditions.
Dr. Dalal’s current research focuses on the intersections of contemplative practices, textual study, and embodiment in Advaita Vedānta. He is the co-director of Gurukulam(The Orchard/Sony Pictures), a sensory-ethnographic study of a contemporary Advaita Vedānta community, co-editor of Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics(Routledge Press), and has published articles in venues such as the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Indian Philosophy, and Journal of Hindu Studies. Dr. Dalal received his PhD in Asian Cultures and Languages from the University of Texas at Austin where he specialized in Sanskrit and Indian philosophy, and an MA in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Dr. Dalal is also a teacher within the traditional lineage of Śaṅkarācārya’s Advaita Vedānta. He spent several years living a monastic lifestyle in India while studying under the direct guidance of the renowned Advaita Vedāntin, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, who gave him permission to teach in 2002.
Dr. Linda Carlson holds the Enbridge Research Chair in Psychosocial Oncology, is Full Professor in Psychosocial Oncology in the Department of Oncology, Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychology. She is the Director of Research and works as a Clinical Psychologist at the Department of Psychosocial Resources at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre (TBCC), where she has worked since 1997. She is also Director of the CIHR SPOR-funded TRACTION program: Training in Research And Clinical Trials in Integrative Oncology, which supports a multidisciplinary group of University of Calgary fellows studying Integrative Oncology.
Dr. Cheryl Giscombe is the Melissa and Harry LeVine Family Distinguished Term Professor in the School of Nursing. She is a social and health psychologist, psychiatric nurse practitioner, certified holistic health coach, and Fellow of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research and the American Academy of Nursing. Dr. Giscombe is also the President of the International Society of Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurses, and she is a summer faculty member for the Harvard School of Public Health’s Health and Happiness Center, in collaboration with the University College in London. Dr. Giscombe’s research focuses on biopsychosocial factors that influence health and health disparities through psychological stress and coping pathways. Dr. Giscombe is an Inaugural Fellow/Design Partner for the Harvard Macy Institute’s Art Museum-Based Health Professions Education Fellowship. . Dr. Giscombe’s research has been consistently funded since 2004 by the American Psychological Association, NIH, SAMHSA, HRSA, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. Most recently, Dr. Giscombe was awarded an R01 grant funded by the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities to examine a culturally relevant self-care intervention to reduce cardiometabolic risk in African American women. Dr. Giscombe is passionate about mentoring the next generation of research scholars and healthcare leaders. As a Josiah Macy Faculty Scholar, Dr. Giscombe developed the Interprofessional Leadership Institute for Behavioral Health Equity. In addition, Dr. Giscombe is a founding member, Executive Committee Member, and Director for Clinical Sciences for the International Society of Contemplative Research. She is director of the Giscombe Health, Equity, and Arts Lab, and her research, practice, and teaching activities integrate mindfulness practices in clinical, community, and educational settings to promote optimal health, wellbeing, and equity for all.
Learn more about her work here
Margaret Cullen is a licensed psychotherapist and was one of the first ten people to become a Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher. For over 25 years, she has pioneered secular contemplative programs for a wide variety of populations including physicians, nurses, HIV positive men, cancer patients, overweight women, military spouses college students, clinicians and educators.
She has developed and taught contemplative interventions for research studies at Stanford, UCSF, Portland State, Penn State, University of Michigan, and University of Miami. In 2013, she developed a mindfulness and compassion program (MBAT – Spouse) for military spouses that she piloted at Ft. Drum, Maxwell Air Force Base, and Joint Operations Special Command. In 2015, she co-authored a book on Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance (MBEB), an evidence-based program that she piloted across the US and Canada. She has also designed and co-delivered teacher trainings for both MBAT-Spouse and MBEB.
As a clinician, Margaret has been a facilitator of support groups for cancer patients and their loved ones for 30 years. In 2010, she was invited by Thupten Jinpa to contribute to the development of the Compassion Cultivation Training, first through the Center for Compassion, Altruism, Research and Education at the Stanford School of Medicine and currently as Founding Faculty for the Compassion Institute. Margaret is also the founder of Compassion Corps, a program offering grants to support compassion teachers to offer free programs to under-resourced communities and a Founding Board Member of the Compassion Education Alliance.
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad is a Fellow of the British Academy and Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University. He is the author of seven books and some fifty papers on a wide variety of topics, from epistemology and metaphysics to comparative theology, Indian politics, and comparative political theory. His latest book is Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India, OUP. Chakravarthi is also a Mind & Life Fellow.
Kalina Christoff is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her work focuses on understanding human thought, using a combination of functional neuroimaging (fMRI), behavioral testing, and theoretical work. Her research spans the full spectrum of thought processes: from spontaneous thought, including phenomena such as mind-wandering and daydreaming; to goal-directed thought, including deliberate reasoning and problem solving; to creative thought, which combines deliberate and spontaneous modes of thought in a dynamic and interactive fashion. She also does work on introspection, meta-cognition, boredom, meditation, dreams, and different forms of self-experience. Her research relates all these mental phenomena to their neural correlates, by constructing neuroscientific models grounded in current scientific understanding of the dynamic interactions between large-scale brain systems, including the default, salience, and frontoparietal control networks. She is also a Mind & Life Fellow.
Genji Sugamura is Professor of psychology at Kansai University, Osaka, Japan. He is a charter board member of the Japanese Association of Mindfulness, and the Japanese Society for Mi no Iryo (medicine of a somato-psycho-social-spiritual unity). He specializes in embodiment issues in theoretical and scientific contexts. He has been trying to incorporate the East Asian philosophy into Western psychological science especially in terms of Buddhism, Taoism, and Shintoism. He has been conducting a series of experiments on the effects of physical postures, breathing, vocal behaviors, and other body movements on mood, motivation, and cognition. His recent interest is in how the Japanese traditional somatic education can be incorporated as a possible way to enhance attention and empathy for elementary students. His research group has developed the school-use chair, specifically designed to support Zazen-like upright posture. Curiously, this chair made students feel very relaxed and yet lively, regardless of students’ grade level, whereas the conventional chair made their mood neither positive nor negative. These findings suggest the potential of self-regulation training through physical posture by simply using redesigned chairs. He is now combining this postural approach with mindfulness training for the college students with neurodevelopmental disorder. On such topics, he has published almost 70 book chapters and journal articles, and made more than 150 conference presentations.
