Jordan Quaglia, PhD, is Associate Professor of Psychology, Director of the Cognitive and Affective Science Laboratory, and Research Director of the Center for the Advancement of Contemplative Education at Naropa University. Jordan has served as Panelist for multiple United Nations Day of Vesak conferences, Fellow and Senior Investigator for Mind and Life Summer Research Institute, and Contemplative Social Justice Scholar for Contemplative Mind in Society. His program of research, supported in part by funding from the Mind and Life Institute and John Templeton Foundation, relies on a variety of approaches and measures to study topics such as mindfulness, compassion, and lucidity. In addition to research and teaching as part of Naropa’s psychology program, he is a lead instructor of the WELCOME: Mindful Compassion Training, an eight-week program focused on the intentional cultivation of self- and other-oriented compassion.
I am a PhD student in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Aarhus, Denmark where I conduct research on the neurobiology of meditation, social cognition, and neural plasticity. I’m particularly interested in the role of rest-stimulus interaction in learning and cognition, and have developed my own model of social-cognitive action control. I come from a diverse academic background, holding both a bachelors degree in Psychology and an MA in Philosophy & Cognitive Science. I’ve previously worked with phenomenologist Shaun Gallagher, investigating self-consciousness and the sense of agency. I maintain an active collaboration with the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, where I am conducting research on individual differences in resting-state connectivity and action-control mechanisms. I hope to continue to a post-doc investigating the relation of these areas to meditation and neurophenomenology. As an enactivist cognitive scientist, I am extremely grateful to be continuing the work begun by Francisco Varela. In my personal life, Vipassana meditation has been a powerful tool for serenity, and I continue to believe in the power of mental training for lifelong growth. The Varela award allowed me to take on a high-risk, labor of love project that would not have otherwise been possible, and I am extremely excited to see the results of the project.
