Inspired by the work of the South African Scholar Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Mays Imad is interested in studying the notion of “reparative humanism,” and what it means to become a flourishing human being and to contribute to intergenerational wellbeing. Mays focuses that question on her work within the academy working with students and colleagues to understand how trauma, including intergenerational trauma, shows up within postsecondary education. 

Specifically she asks: When we are confronted with intersecting crises, how do institutions balance their mission of education with the fact that many of their students and employees are experiencing chronic, if not traumatic, levels of stress and burnout? Why is it imperative not to ignore the shadow of trauma and to leverage the power of meaningful relationships to create conditions for healing, learning and transformation. 

Within that overarching theme, Mays investigates the following questions: 1) How to use what we know about the neurobiology of learning to optimize conditions for learning for all students? 2) How to create structural immunity that helps cultivate equitable and healthy ecosystems? 3) How to use our positionality to advocate for readily accessible and culturally-grounded mental health support for all students?

Learn more about her work here

Anu Gupta is a human rights lawyer, social scientist, educator, and the Founder of BE MORE with Anu. He is also a gay immigrant man of color with lived experiences of bias and bullying that almost led him to take his life. But he didn’t. Instead, he dedicated himself to find solutions to bias through two decades of original research, fieldwork with diverse communities globally, and 10,000 hours of meditation practice.

A peer-reviewed author and the principal investigator behind BE MORE’s research, he secured highly competitive grants from institutions like the National Science Foundation, NYS Health Foundation, American Heart Association, among others, to validate BE MORE’s science-backed, meditation-driven method to break bias. He has written and spoken extensively, including on the TED stage, the Oprah Conversation, Fast Company, and Newsweek.

Anu worked as an attorney, a research scientist, and a teacher in the United States, Europe, and Asia, prior to founding BE MORE. He is a trained meditation and yoga teacher (500-hours) and is a living testament of the power of these ancient sciences to transform inner and external turmoil. His meditations can be found on the Insight Timer, Open, and the Ten Percent Happier meditation apps.

Anu obtained his JD from NYU Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar, an MPhil in Development Studies from Cambridge University, and a BA (summa cum laude) in Int’l Relations, Islamic Studies & Chemistry from NYU. He also serves as a Systems Designer for Dickinson Law’s Antiracist Development Institute (ADI). He has served as a Board Member for the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (BCBS) and The Middle Collegiate Church’s Middle Project.

Follow @bemorewithanu or learn more at bemorewithanu.com.

Dr. Cortland Dahl is a scientist, translator, and non-profit leader with a lifelong interest in meditation and the science of human flourishing. His journey began in the early 1990s when he first learned to meditate. His passion for training the mind led him on a journey around the world, from monasteries in Tibet to zendos in Japan, culminating in eight years living in Tibetan refugee settlements on the outskirts of Kathmandu.

During his time in Asia, he became fluent in Tibetan and became a prolific translator and scholar, receiving a master’s degree in Buddhist studies and publishing twelve volumes of translations, including ancient meditation manuals and treatises on Buddhist philosophy.

During these years he also co-founded Tergar with Mingyur Rinpoche, a global network of meditation communities on six continents. He currently serves on the board of directors and as Executive Director of Tergar International, the non-profit organization that oversees the Tergar community. He is also a senior meditation instructor and offers workshops and meditation retreats around the world.

Cortland studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was mentored by Dr. Richard Davidson and received a Ph.D. in Mind, Brain, and Contemplative Science, the first ever degree of its kind awarded by the university. He has since published numerous scientific articles, including a new scientific framework for the cultivation of human flourishing, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Cortland is also the creator of the Healthy Minds Program, a freely available a mobile app that was recently recommended by the New York Times as one of three recommended meditation apps. The Healthy Minds Program app has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and is now being used scientific research by some of the leading research centers in the world.

Cortland currently lives with his wife and son in Madison, Wisconsin.

Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D. is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT; the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School; and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

He received his B.A. in Applied Mathematics (magna cum laude) from Harvard College, his M.A. and Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University and his M.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Medical School. Professor Brown completed his internship in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and his anesthesiology residency at MGH.

Professor Brown is an anesthesiologist-statistician whose research is defining the neuroscience of how anesthetics produce the states of general anesthesia. He also develops statistical methods for neuroscience data analysis.

Professor Brown is a fellow of the IEEE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering.

Professor Brown has received an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, the Sacks Prize from the National Institute of Statistical Science, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Applied Mathematics, the American Society of Anesthesiologists Excellence in Research Award, the Dickson Prize in Science, the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience, the Pierre Galletti Award, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, and a Doctor of Science Honoris Causa from the University of Southern California.

he/him – Rui Afonso is a Brazilian researcher interested in the effects of contemplative practices and altered states of consciousness (self-induced and substance-induced) on mental health. His background is in psychobiology and neuroscience. For decades he has been a teacher and practitioner of Yoga and meditation.

My Ngoc has a background in neuroscience from Harvard University and clinical social work from Simmons University. She has taught mindfulness for over five years in community, healthcare, university, and virtual settings, as well as in English and Vietnamese. Complementing this are several years of coordinating a federally-funded research study on incorporating mindfulness into healthcare and extensive experience working with immigrants and refugees in healthcare and crisis centers. Currently a second year PhD student in Social Work at the University of Denver, her work focuses on expanding mindfulness research into culturally and linguistically diverse populations and for community healing.

Gabriela Torres Platas, holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from McGill University where she studied the implication of glial cells and their inflammatory contribution in depressed suicides. After her doctoral studies, she pursued clinical research training and Co-lead a laboratory at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal where she conducted several clinical trials to study the biological mechanisms of Mindfulness-based interventions when used as a treatment in psychiatric disorders. She is currently pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University in the Paller Lab in collaboration with the Emory-Tibet Science program, to study the neural correlates of sleep & dream yoga in Chicago and in different Monasteries in India.

Eli Susman is a Ph.D. student in Professor Allison Harvey’s Lab in the clinical science program at UC Berkeley. He graduated from Middlebury in 2018 with a BA in Psychology. Before starting at Berkeley Eli worked as a research coordinator at Harvard in Professor Kate McLaughlin’s Stress and Development Lab. Eli’s passion for clinical science developed over the course of more than a decade working with high-risk youth and young adults in community wilderness therapy in-patient and research settings. Under the mentorship of Professor Harvey Eli aims to develop more efficient accessible and deployable interventions by drawing from the wisdom and science of contemplative practice and the science of habit formation to foster compassion and freedom from human suffering. Eli is a Certified Yoga Teacher Laughter Yoga Leader and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. When not in the lab or clinic he enjoys meditation yoga skiing hiking trail running and contact improvisation.

Natalie Lecy, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at the University of South Dakota and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Her research focuses on mindfulness-based interventions and increasing inclusivity in higher education for first-generation and marginalized students through trauma-informed and student-centered approaches. Natalie has over a decade of experience practicing in clinical and community settings. Through her career she has secured funding for innovative community interventions utilizing collective impact models to leverage local resources. Natalie operates a private practice utilizing mindfulness-based therapy while working primarily with LGBTQI+ populations. She enjoys enhancing her clinical practice through mindfulness-based research and vice versa.