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.

Yuval Hadash is a Psychologist and Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology working with Prof. Amit Bernstein in the International Research Collaborative on Anxiety (IRCA) laboratory at the University of Haifa, Israel. He conducted my undergraduate studies in psychology and humanities at the University of Haifa. He received training in mindfulness-based interventions, cognitive-behavioral therapies and psychodynamic therapy. His research interests are focused on understanding core processes in mindfulness and its mechanisms of action. He is specifically interested in integrating Buddhist conceptions of mindfulness, self-referentiality and equanimity into scientific conceptualizations and investigations of mindfulness processes and mechanisms. Accordingly, he is currently working on research projects investigating novel implicit and behavioral measurements of these processes, and testing their relations to well being, maladaptation and psychopathology.

Sucharit Katyal is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He is broadly interested in understanding how the mind becomes aware. His research so far has focused on using state-of-the-art EEG and fMRI techniques to study visual attention and awareness. He has looked at subcortical networks of attention using high-resolution fMRI, neural signals underlying binocular rivalry using visual adaptation and SSVEP, and is currently undertaking a big data project to understand the neural bases for individual differences in bistable perception using EEG.

Brianna earned an M.A. in Psychological and Brain Sciences with additional coursework in Religious Studies and Philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara in June 2016 after having obtained a B.A. in Neuroscience, Psychology, and Chinese from Macalester College in 2013. Combining phenomenological and experimental methods with perspectives from both the humanities and social sciences, she researches “ego death” or selfless, non-dual experiences, particularly how meditation and other Buddhist practices contribute to the transformation of the “ego” or sense of “self,” as well as how these changes manifest as pro-social and pro-environmental behavior. Throughout summer 2016, Brianna will serve as an Assistant Specialist through the Department of Religious Studies at UCSB, conducting research through the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center with the support of Mind and Life’s Varela Award at a Humanistic Buddhist monastery in Taiwan.