Jessica Peters is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Child Mental Health T32 at Rhode Island Hospital and the Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where she works with Dr. Shirley Yen. She obtained her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Kentucky, where she was mentored by Dr. Ruth Baer. As a doctoral student, she studied mindfulness as well as mechanisms of psychopathology potentially targeted by mindfulness-based interventions, such as rumination and impulsivity, in the context of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and substance use disorders. Her dissertation utilized neuroimaging to examine the function of anger rumination in BPD. She has published on assessment of mindfulness and the particular importance of nonjudgmental orientation to experience, especially in regard to prevention of psychopathology and looks forward to furthering that line of work with the Varela Award.
This project in alternative secular epistemologies is rooted in several months of intensive research and writing completed as a Mind & Life visiting scholar in Amherst in 2015, as well as intellectual encounters as a presenter at ISCS 2014 and research fellow at MLSRI 2015. William Rubel is a current PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, writing on science, sensation, and the history of feeling in romantic poetry. After receiving a BA, summa cum laude, from Columbia University, he completed a master’s thesis on embodied mind, drawing on contemplative neuroscience (Varela, Damasio, Thompson, Davidson). His interests include process philosophy, political ecology, science studies, haptic aesthetics, nonwestern epistemologies, and ecologies of affect. He is excited to build bridges between speculative metaphysics and buddhist epistemology with Gen. Lobsang Nor- bu Shastri at the Central University of Tibetan Studies later this year.
Daniel Berry is a Ph.D. candidate and graduate teaching assistant in the experimental psychology program (social division) at Virginia Commonwealth University. Implicit to theories of helping behavior, but often overlooked, is the quality of attention one devotes to others in need. His program of research broadly involves increasing our understanding of the attentional bases of social sensitivity. More specifically, his research focuses on whether a particular quality of attention called mindfulness, a receptive attention to one’s current experiences, can catalyze helping behavior. Within this domain of inquiry, he is interested in mechanisms of dispositional mindfulness and mindfulness training (e.g., empathic concern and social connection) that promote helping behavior designed to assist those in need. Furthermore, his research program examines such questions in social contexts that typically undermine social sensitivity and helping behavior – for example, intergroup helping contexts.
Dr. James L. Floman is an Associate Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He received his PhD at the University of British Columbia, where he studied the effects of mindfulness and compassion meditation on teacher emotion regulation and prosocial behavior with Dr. Kimberly Schonert-Reichl. He received his MA in Psychology at Rutgers University, where he studied appraisal theory and discrete positive emotions with Dr. Ira Roseman. Dr. Floman’s research aims to foster healthy developmental trajectories in adults by drawing on innovations in affective science from psychology, education, and neuroscience.
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.
