I am an Associate Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University where I direct the Affective & Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory. My research program uses the tools of human neuroscience to study how the brain creates emotion and how these brain systems are implicated in health and well-being. I also study how stress affects the emotional brain, and bidirectional signaling between the brain and the immune system in generating risk and resilience for mental and physical health problems. More recently, I have begun examining the effect of intervention programs – including meditation – on neuroimmune signaling, and the potential of these programs to protect the developing brain from stress and adversity. I am very interested in the confluence between science and Buddhism, and am currently serving as Co-Director of Research Training for the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI). This initiative aims to foster collaborations between academic scientists and Tibetan Buddhist monastics and to train monastic scientists in methods for studying the human brain, including EEG and both functional and structural brain imaging.
