Matthew Hirshberg, PhD, focuses on mediation-based interventions (MBIs) that promote social-emotional competencies, mental health, and well-being in educational contexts. Matt’s interests lie in the interactions between teacher and student outcomes, whether strengthening teacher well-being supports effective teaching and promotes student development, the structure of social-emotional competencies across development but particularly during adolescence, and the role that developmentally and contextually appropriate MBIs might play in improving academic/professional, social, and mental health outcomes in students and teachers. As a former classroom teacher (and student), Matt holds the deep conviction that education can be a powerful lever to improve individual and societal outcomes, but only when the education of qualities like awareness, generosity and compassion are allotted the same importance as the education of academic skills. Matt hopes that his research will raise awareness of the importance of these and other qualities, and by doing so, help educational systems move towards a more humane and holistic model of schooling.
Lindsey Knowles is a second-year Clinical Psychology graduate student at the University of Arizona in the Grief, Loss and Social Stress Laboratory of Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor. Her research interests encompass a variety of topics in the fields of psychoneuroimmunology, regulatory flexibility, stress, contemplative science, and integrative medicine. During her graduate career, she aims to better understand the impact of regulatory flexibility and contemplative practices on mental and physical health outcomes following profound life stressors (e.g. bereavement), combining self-report, behavioral, and psychophysiological techniques. She is currently engaged in various projects including the evaluation of a mindfulness-based classroom stress management program for elementary school students, a novel online grief support intervention for widows and widowers, and an examination of the relation between regulatory flexibility and heart rate variability in divorced and widowed individuals.
Jeff (Yanli) Lin is a postdoctoral scholar working in the Cognitive Control & Psychopathology Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his PhD in clinical psychology from Michigan State University. His research broadly aims to elucidate the effects of mindfulness and other contemplative practices on cognitive control and emotion regulation. Jeff’s long-term aspiration is to develop an interdisciplinary research program that intersects the arts and sciences, drawing insights from psychology, neuroscience, religion, and philosophy to advance understanding and treatment of human suffering.
A doctoral candidate (Anthropology-University of Illinois at Chicago), Dylan Lott’s research examines the implementation and impact of the Monastic Science Initiative. Building on undergraduate work in Psychology, he teaches courses in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, and the Anthropology of Dreams and Dreaming. Prior to graduate study, he served as a clinical massage therapist in private practice. Using a range of modalities, he worked alongside children and adults with disabilities and post-surgical and -partum populations. From 2007 and 2012, he studied psychoanalytic theory through the Ecole Freudienne du Quebec. Presently, he is completing a project to preserve and repatriate linguistic materials and tribal artifacts on behalf of the Parintintin, an imperiled Amazonian people. He is also an active board member of the Himalaya Project. The Project is devoted to the preservation of Tibetan medicine and works to build a school in the impoverished Dolpo region of Nepal.
Dr. Proulx’s work focuses on the development of mindfulness programs in underserved communities and how these programs may be protective for health in those communities.
His efforts bridge Native American and African-American traditional contemplative and healing practices and mainstream mindfulness practices and how mindfulness affects resilience and well-being across a person’s developmental trajectory. Dr. Proulx’s work includes studying changes in physiological markers, such as cortisol or blood sugar levels, their relationship to stress and how responses to stress earlier in life may affect health later in life.
Stress in minority communities is also influenced by historical and cultural traumas and his work is designed to address the loss of culture and traditions by relying on community input to assimilate community strengths and traditions that are already “mindful” into the mindfulness intervention. The goals of these interventions reflect the distinct cultures of the people he works with and affect health disparities in conditions such as diabetes and dementia.
Dr. Proulx is recognized as a developmental health psychologist and his work integrates other disciplines including public health, medicine, molecular biology, and life course sociology.
Learn more about his work here
My main research interests and current endeavours are focused on the neuropsychophysiological mechanisms through which mind-body interventions such as mindfulness impact behavior related to maladaptive emotion regulation. My research background during my graduate studies was centered on studying the neurobiology of mindfulness and emotion regulation using functional MRI, which showed that mindfulness regulates emotion by targeting specific affect-related brain circuitries, and that enhanced meditation experience was related to differences in the organization of a brain network involved in mind-wandering. Later, my PhD thesis’ results showed that mindfulness meditation experience was related to an attenuation (at a neuropsychophysiological level) of the influence of negative emotional states (fear and pain), supporting the implementation of mindfulness in treating disorders involving cyclical and perpetuating interactions between fear and pain (eg. anxiety, chronic pain). As an independent researcher at Bishop’s University (Quebec), I was involved in leading research projects on the effects of contemplative practice on the psychophysiology of emotion and the experience of past trauma. Currently, as a post-doctoral researcher with Dr. Judson Brewer, my work is focused on projects related to reinforcement-learning mechanistic frameworks underlying the impact of mindfulness on addictive behavior, and examining the neural correlates of mindfulness using combined neuroimaging modalities.
Rachel Jacobs is currently a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is interesting in using fMRI to study how interventions for adolescent depression work. She is currently examining whether using the skill of mindfulness can help interrupt ruminative tendencies among adolescents with a history of depression and whether this can help prevent depressive relapse. She is also learning about the intrinsic networks of the brain and how to measure these networks using resting state fMRI so that she can test what network patterns are associated with rumination and depression.
Jacobs received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Northwestern University in 2009 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Translational Child Psychiatry at Columbia University. Her doctoral work focused on cognitive mediators of treatment outcome among adolescents with depression.
Yoga and meditation have been part of her personal, but not work, life until recently. She is thrilled to be able to study how to use mindfulness to help youth and how mindfulness might change the brain.
Emily Lindsay is a research professor in psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her theory-driven work shows that mindfulness interventions improve health outcomes via stress buffering pathways and that acceptance training is a key component of mindfulness interventions that drives these effects. Her current work examines whether mindfulness interventions impact stress responding in ways that offset health risk among people exposed to early life adversity. Long-term, she hopes to contribute to the goal of addressing inequities in public health. Emily completed her PhD in social/health psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and postdoctoral training in psychoneuroimmunology at Pitt.
Lisa May is a doctoral candidate in the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on understanding the neural mechanisms by which cognitive and affective processes affect pain perception, using pharmaceutical methods and functional MRI. Her ultimate goal is to improve chronic pain treatment, so she am particularly interested in psychological pain relief that can be engaged in intentionally through the cultivation of practices and habits. Her dissertation research is investigating the neural mechanisms by which gratitude and mindfulness affect the way pain is perceived and how these relate to negative beliefs and attitudes about pain.
