Jordan Kohn received his B.A. in biology from Reed College and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at Emory University and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. His research interests are 1) to elucidate the biological mechanisms by which social adversity affects human health and well being, and 2) to investigate the extent to which positive changes in the social environment, specifically psychosocial interventions like meditation, can mitigate the deleterious effects of adversity. Kohn also explore how early-life maltreatment alters immune development and its health consequences later in life. Concurrent with his graduate work, he teaches Cognitively-Based Compassion Training at Emory and has had the privilege of introducing CBCT to adolescents in foster care, children, undergraduates, physicians, and prisoners.
Robert Kaplan is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, teacher, and musician in dance. His work, Living Musically™, uses improvisation as a model or metaphor to understand the world and live well in it, providing tools and strategies to improve mind-body focus as a foundation for team skills such as communication, conflict, and enabling others. His work within healthcare and the arts offers tools to support the notion that being present, self-aware, and team-aware are critical in all endeavors. He has been a composer, teacher and musician in dance since 1976, having taught and performed at major national and international dance festivals since 1980. His book, Rhythmic Training for Dancers, CD-ROM, An Interactive Guide to Music for Dancers, and Instructor’s Guide, were published internationally by Human Kinetics, Inc. Over seventy of his scores for choreography have been performed throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Mexico. He is a founding member and former president of the International Guild of Musicians in Dance, has been the recipient of numerous Meet-the-Composer grants as well as university grants, and is a full professor, and music director for dance in the School of Film, Dance and Theatre at Arizona State University.
Erin Maresh is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona, working with Dr. Jessica Andrews-Hanna in the Neuroscience of Emotion and Thought Lab. Previously, she received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Virginia, where she worked with Drs. Jim Coan and Bethany Teachman, and completed her clinical internship at the Minneapolis VA. Broadly, she researches the contexts and conditions under which internally-guided, self-focused thought is maladaptive, both for individuals experiencing self-focused thought and for their friends and relationship partners, using EEG and fMRI to identify the neural mechanisms behind these processes. In particular, she is interested in the relationship between social anxiety and activity in the default mode network. She is additionally interested in exploring the opposite end of the self-focus spectrum — situations characterized by an absence of self-focus, such as states of flow, experiences of awe, and meditation.
Ekaterina Denkova is Research Assistant Professor in the laboratory of Dr. Amishi Jha at the University of Miami. Ekaterina received her Ph.D. from the University of Strasbourg, where she examined the neural underpinnings of autobiographical memory in healthy and brain-damaged people. Shortly after, she joined the University of Alberta as a Canadian Institutes of Health Research-Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Postdoctoral Fellow. There, she examined the impact of attention-based emotion regulation strategies on the way emotional autobiographical memories are remembered. This led her to seek integrating mindfulness into her research and to join the Jha Lab, initially as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Broadly, her research interests reside in examining the neural underpinnings of cognitive and affective processes involved in memory and mind wandering, a concept linked to autobiographical memory, and the effects of mindfulness-based attention training programs on these processes. Her research involves brain imaging methods (fMRI, ERP) and cognitive and affective assessments in diverse populations.
Samantha Davis is a third-year doctoral student in the College of Public Health at Temple University in the Social and Behavioral Sciences department. Her interests are to improve health outcomes using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness-based practices for behavior change in underserved populations. Her interests have focused on substance use/dependence research which began during her undergraduate degree working in a lab investigating substance use in college students. The majority of her research focus is on tobacco control through smoking cessation interventions. Currently, she is involved in several research projects such a large, multi-level, National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded intervention that provides CBT counseling to low-income female smokers with children. Additionally, she is interested in the role of psychosocial factors in vulnerable populations, such as mattering to others in breast cancer patients. Her research has focused on unique and underserved populations. She has collaborated with colleagues on projects working with populations such as low-income women and children, racial/ethnic minorities, teen girls, women in Rwanda and cancer survivors. After completing her PhD, she strives to continue to work with these populations using mindfulness, CBT and evidence-based practices to promote health and well-being.
You know that moment when you notice that your mind was wandering? Maybe you’re reading a book and notice that you’ve been scanning the page with your eyes but not actually reading? In my doctoral studies I’m studying what the brain does that makes you notice. More precisely, I am working on understanding “meta-awareness” and the cognitive neuroscience of how we notice when we are not paying attention. Meta-awareness could be thought of as antithetical to mindfulness. My goal is to increase the frequency of meta-awareness through an understanding of its neural underpinnings.
I also study meditation. Most modern meditations use the breath to anchor attention, but my work suggests that other anchors may be more suitable for some people. I have also studied the drawbacks of meditation.
I also study psychedelics. We ran the first pre-registered scientific study on microdosing psychedelic substances.
I am a proponent of open science and pre-registration: the way science was meant to be done!
I am also interested in promoting intellectual conversations outside of academia. There’s no need for such conversations to stop after one gets a degree!
