Jacqueline Lutz, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion (CMC), Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, MA. She received her PhD in psychology from the University of Zurich, working in the emotion regulation research group at the Psychiatric University clinic and under the supervision of Prof. Lutz Jäncke. 

Jacqueline’s research interests are in the fields of affective neuroscience, emotion regulation, mindfulness, self-referential processes, and their implication for clinical psychology. At CMC, and in collaboration with the MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, she conducts an fMRI pilot study to investigate the potential of mindfulness training in a primary care setting, particularly related to self-regulation. Further, she is developing new translational research to gain a more precise understanding of psychological and physiologic processes related to self-compassion. In the future, she wishes to further investigate who profits from which contemplative and mind-body intervention.

Lauren Ministero received a BA with high honors in psychology as well as journalism and new media from The University at Buffalo. She is currently a 5th year PhD student studying social psychology at The University at Buffalo. Her research interests include compassion, mindfulness, goal pursuit, and the self. A central question that guides Lauren’s work is: What personal and situational factors facilitate responding to victims of suffering, and how do these factors simultaneously impact the self? Previous research demonstrates that compassion predicts helping behavior as well as distress and avoidance. In her research, Lauren examines which components of compassion are truly predictive of helping, and how mindset can affect goal pursuit processes, tipping the scales in favor of pursuing prosocial goals. Additionally, she investigates how factors such as empathy and mindfulness influence how the self is expressed. In her spare time, Lauren enjoys yoga, exercise, and plant-based cooking. 

Sarah Priddy, MSSW, LCSW, is a doctoral student at the University of Utah College of Social Work. Her primary research interest lies in the intersection of social work and neuroscience – the treatment of stress-related conditions, such as addiction, anxiety, trauma and chronic pain through mindfulness-based clinical interventions. Sarah’s interest in mindfulness-based therapies has developed over the past six years through training in and implementation of mindfulness-based interventions.  Sarah currently works with Dr. Eric Garland at the University of Utah, assisting with the several randomized controlled trials of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) for chronic pain and opioid misuse. Sarah is honored to have received a Francisco J. Varela Research Award to conduct a mixed methods RCT of MORE for pregnant women prescribed opioid maintenance therapy.

Joseph Therriault is currently pursuing his master’s in neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Canada under the supervision of Dr. Vasavan Nair and Dr. Pedro Rosa-Neto. His research focuses on using multimodal neuroimaging tools to understand the aging brain in health and disease. In particular, he is interested in understanding the factors that are protective against neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s Disease. To this end, he is currently studying the effects of meditation and yoga on the aging brain. He is also researching how levels of self-awareness are related to neurodegeneration in aging. Finally, his lab is evaluating tools to better understand and diagnose brain disorders so we can give people the best medical treatments possible. Outside of neurology, he is interested in the meaningful integration of Buddhist psychology and philosophy into modern Western meditation training programs designed for psychological well-being.

Niki Clements, PhD is the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Assistant Professor of Religion at Rice University. She works at the disciplinary intersection between the history of Christian practice, philosophy of religion and religious ethics. She specializes in Christian asceticism and mysticism in late antiquity, highlighting its resources for thinking through contemporary ethical formation and conceptions of the self. She is currently completing the first comprehensive treatment of the ethical thought of John Cassian (c.360-c.435), a late antique Catholic architect of Latin monasticism doctrinally marginalized for his optimistic views on human agency. Engaging Michel Foucault’s late work on ethics — which sees Cassian as a crucial inaugurator of modern disciplinary subjectivity — she critiques the conceptual limitations that Foucault’s philosophical categories impose on his reading of Cassian, late antique Christianity and the study of religion. She also pursues a trans-disciplinary approach with cognitive neuroscience to argue that ethical formation integrates consciousness, embodiment and affectivity. She is the volume editor for Mental Religion: The Brain, Cognition, and Culture, as part of the forthcoming “Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks.”

Noga Zerubavel, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Zerubavel is the Director of the Stress, Trauma, and Recovery Treatment Clinic at Duke, which provides treatment for trauma-related disorders including PTSD, dissociative disorders, and other sequelae of trauma. She established the mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) program at Duke, and supervises psychiatry and psychology trainees in using such mindfulness-based psychotherapy. Her research interests are focused on the applications of mindfulness-based interventions for individuals with a history of trauma using individual and group therapies. Her current project focuses on using mindfulness practice as treatment for dissociation, addressing potential contraindications through psychoeducation, and elaborating the mechanisms through which mindfulness practice can modify habitual dissociative processes.

Noopur Amin is deeply interested in empathy and compassion, both as a guidepost for her personal daily life, and as a calling to uncover its neural basis as a neuroscientist. She is currently a postdoc at UC Berkeley in Dr. Daniela Kaufer’s lab, where she is studying the neural basis of empathy and prosocial behaviors in rodent models using an integrative approach and applying molecular, physiological, and behavioral techniques. Her current research projects include: 1) investigating the hormonal basis and neural circuits mediating helping behavior; and 2) studying early life stress-induced alterations in neurogenesis, cell proliferation and migration. For her graduate career, she obtained a Ph.D. in the Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley in Dr. Frederic Theunissen’s computational and auditory physiology songbird lab. There she used in vivo neurophysiological recordings and systems-level analyses to investigate the processing of complex natural sounds and the roles of development and patterned acoustic experience on shaping high-level auditory neural responses.