Speakers
B. Alan Wallace, PhD
Alan Wallace is a prominent Buddhist scholar, translator, and meditation teacher. He is the founder and director of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies and of the Centers for Contemplative Research in Colorado and Italy. Alan has participated in dialogues and research between Buddhists and scientists and is an outspoken critic of the detrimental limitations placed on science by the unquestioned beliefs of materialism. Discontinuing his university studies in 1971, he moved to Dharamsala, India to study Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, and language. He was ordained by H.H. the Dalai Lama two years later and, over fourteen years as a monk, he studied with and translated for many of the generation’s greatest lamas. He received his PhD at Stanford, researching the interface between Buddhism and Western science and philosophy, with a focus on the contemplative cultivation of attention, mindfulness, and introspection. He has written and translated more than 40 books.
Brooke Lavelle, PhD
Brooke D. Lavelle, Ph.D. (she/her) is the Co-Founder and President of the Courage of Care Coalition, a nonprofit devoted to building communities and cultures of compassionate, truth-telling, healing-centered, visionary and transformative practice. Courage’s diverse, interdisciplinary, multi-generational team provides training and consultation in relational compassion practices, anti-oppressive pedagogies, restorative healing methods and systems tools to organizers, activists, and social service professionals, as well as to educational, spiritual and human rights organisations.
Please visit Courage of Care to learn more about the community, team, and approach and how you can join the movement to build compassionate cultures of liberatory practice.
Christian Howard
Christian Howard (all kind pronouns) is a narrative designer and cultural strategist building equitable futures for individuals, communities, and organizations. His partnerships in the US and abroad have focused on cultivating liberatory design practices to uproot oppressive power structures and inspire individual and collective transformation. He is a socially-engaged Buddhist teacher, integrating his study and practice in Tibetan Buddhist traditions (primarily Gelug and Nyingma lineages) into his work.
To learn more about his work you can visit his website.
Cortland Dahl, PhD
Cortland is a scientist, translator, and meditation teacher. His work focuses on the psychological mechanisms of different forms of meditation, as well as the development of programs that can be used as the basis for research and the broad dissemination strategies to train the mind. He currently serves as Research Scientist and Chief Contemplative Officer at UW-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds and its affiliated non-profit, Healthy Minds Innovations, and also as Executive Director of Tergar International, an organization he co-founded with Mingyur Rinpoche that oversees a global meditation community.
You can learn more about some of his research on Mapping the Interface between Meditation and Neuroscience at Center for Healthy Minds.
Dacher Keltner, PhD
Dacher Keltner is a Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley and Faculty Director of the Greater Good Science Center. He has published over 200 articles and six books. He has won many research, teaching, and service awards, consulted for Pixar, the Sierra Club, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Daniel Goleman, PhD
Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist and science journalist. His 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence was a bestseller and has been translated into more than 40 languages. His most recent book, Altered Traits, was co-authored with Richard Davidson and reviews the best meditation research. Dan has also organized a series of intensive conversations between the Dalai Lama and scientists, which resulted in the books Healing Emotions, Destructive Emotions, and Ecology, Ethics, and Interdependence. For the Dalai Lama’s 80th birthday Dan wrote A Force for Good: The Dalai Lama’s Vision for our World. He is a former board member and a Founding Steward of the Mind & Life Institute.
You can learn more about Dr. Goleman's work on his website.
Daniela Labra Cardero
Daniela Labra is an expert in the design of online and face-to-face curriculum development, teacher training, and the link between scientific research and the pedagogical practice of socio-emotional education. Trained as a biologist, she was a professor-researcher and university coordinator for ten years. Daniela is co-author of books and programs on socio-emotional education, lectures nationally and internationally and is a senior instructor. She is a Founding Partner and General Director for the non-profit AtentaMente Consultores AC, a consultant for Healthy Minds Innovations, and is currently enrolled at Harvard Kennedy School.
You can learn more about her work at AtentaMente, an educational non-profit whose mission is to provide tools for well-being. They have participated in the development of Mexico's nation-wide SEL curriculum, training more than 15,000 teachers in person and 200,000 online. Their research-based programs are currently running the largest yet RCT for preschool SEL teacher training and they have developed a free app for IOS and Google Play to support these trainings.
Eve Ekman, PhD
Eve Ekman is a contemplative social scientist focusing on emotional awareness working in health care, wellbeing, and technology. Eve draws from interdisciplinary skills and first-person experiential knowledge from clinical social work, integrative medicine, contemplative science, and meditation. Eve is a Senior Fellow at the University of California Berkeley Greater Good Science Center, Director of Cultivating Emotional Balance Training Program, and volunteer clinical faculty at the UCSF Department of Pediatrics. Eve is a second-generation emotion researcher and has collaborated with her father, Paul Ekman, on the Atlas of Emotions project. Eve shares her dad's deep love of bagels and is a devout practitioner of cold water ocean play.
To learn more about her work you can visit the Atlas of Emotions, an online website for emotional awareness commissioned by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and co-created by Eve and Paul Ekman. You can also learn more about a contemplative science training for learning emotional balance that was founded by Alan Wallace and Paul Ekman and is currently lead by Eve Ekman and a global teacher network at Cultivating Emotion Balance.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama
The 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, spiritual leader of the Tibetan people; Author, The Art of Happiness and The Universe in a Single Atom.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD
Jon Kabat-Zinn has a Doctorate in molecular biology from MIT, under Nobel Laureate Salvador Luria. He is Professor of Medicine emeritus at UMass Medical School, and Founder of MBSR. Author of 14 books in 45 languages, Jon's work has contributed to a growing movement of mindfulness into mainstream institutions such as medicine, psychology, health care, neuroscience, schools, higher education, business, social justice, criminal juctice, prisons, the law, technology, government, and professional sports. Over 700 hospitals and medical centers around the world now offer MBSR.
Kai Horton
Kai (they/them/theirs) is a non-binary, queer, non-black person of color, and child of immigrants. They are devoted to dismantling societal binaries – the either/or thinking that is imposed upon us in our culture. Kai is passionate about helping QTBIPOC folx on their healing journey and quest for liberation. Kai is a member of the Faculty at Courage of Care Coalition where they build curriculum and offer workshops for the BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities. Outside of their work life, you can find them out in nature, talking about astrology, or writing poetry.
Kaira Jewel Lingo
Kaira Jewel Lingo began practicing mindfulness in 1997 and teaches Buddhist meditation, secular mindfulness, and compassion internationally. After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel now teaches in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition. She teaches at the intersection of racial, climate and social justice with a focus on activists, Black/Indigenous/People of Color, artists, educators, families, and youth. Now based in New York, she offers spiritual mentoring to individuals and groups.
You can learn more about her upcoming events and join her mailing list by visiting her website. You can also pre-order her new book coming out October 2021: We Were Made for These Times: Skillfully Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption.
Laurie Santos, PhD
Dr. Laurie Santos is Professor of Psychology and Head of Silliman College at Yale University. Dr. Santos is an expert on human cognition and the cognitive biases that impede better choices. Her course, Psychology and the Good Life, became Yale’s most popular course in over 300 years. She was voted a “Brilliant 10” young mind by Popular Science and a “Campus Celebrity” by Time Magazine. Her podcast, The Happiness Lab, has over 35 million downloads.
To learn more about Dr. Santos and enroll in her free Science of Well-Being course you can visit her website.
Mark Greenberg, PhD
Mark Greenberg, Ph.D. is the Emeritus Bennett Chair of Prevention Science at Penn State University. He is the author of over 350 articles on the development of well-being and the effects of prevention efforts on children and families. He is a Founding Board Member of CASEL, and the current Chairperson of the Board of CREATE, a non-profit devoted to improving the quality of schooling and the lives of teachers and students.
You can connect with Dr. Greenberg here.
Martin Vitorino, PhD
Martin serves as lead faculty for Courage of Care Coalition, where he develops curriculum and facilitates offerings that merge contemplative, somatic and mindfulness practices with social justice work. He also leads a meditation group for the Transgender/GNC/NB/GQ communities. Martin earned a Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University and a B.A. in Psychology and Multicultural Studies from Westfield State University. He loves camping, cats and babies!
Visit Courage of Care to learn more about their offerings. You can also sign up for the trans/gnc/nb meditation group at InsightLa.
Matthieu Ricard, PhD
Matthieu Ricard is an author, photographer and translator. He first visited India in 1967, where he met many of the great spiritual masters from Tibet. After completing his Ph.D. degree in cell genetics in 1972, he moved to the Himalayan region where he became a Buddhist monk and has been living for the past 45 years. His books include Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World. He devotes all the proceedings of his activities to humanitarian projects in Asia, through Karuna-Shechen, his organization which benefits over 350,000 people every year. Matthieu has been part of the Mind and Life Institute since 2000.
You can learn more about his work by visiting his website.
Michelle Shiota, PhD
Michelle “Lani” Shiota is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University, and Director of ASU's Substance Abuse Translational Research Network (SATRN). Her research investigates positive emotions, emotion regulation, emotional processes in close relationships, and emotion-related mechanisms of health behavior change. She is an editor of the Handbook of Positive Emotions (Guilford), and author of the textbook Emotion (Oxford University Press). Beyond her academic identity, she maintains an active artistic life as a performing singer, dancer, and dance instructor.
You can find out more about her research here.
Miko Brown
Miko Brown (she/her) is a member of the faculty and BIPoC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) training and facilitation team at Courage of Care Coalition . She co-holds the space for Courage of Care’s RelationSHIFT programming and affinity space for those who are BIPoC as well as LGBTQ+. Miko has over a decade of experience as a nonprofit professional committed to social justice and equity with a background in mental health and wellness work.
Mingyur Rinpoche
Born in Nepal, Mingyur Rinpoche began to study meditation as a young boy and spent many years of his childhood in strict retreat and traditional training. Rinpoche has also had a lifelong interest in Western science and psychology, which has led to many fruitful collaborations with neuroscientists and psychologists. In his approach to teaching meditation, he integrates traditional Buddhist practice and philosophy with the current scientific understanding of the mind and mental health – making the practice of mediation relevant and accessible to students around the world. Rinpoche is the author of the best-selling book The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness, as well as several other titles.
You can learn more about his work through Tergar Meditation Community and find his Online Training for The Joy of Living here.
Modupe Akinola, PhD
Modupe Akinola examines how organizational environments—with the pressures of deadlines and multitasking—can lead to stress, and how this stress can spill over to affect performance. She studies why some people thrive under stress while others buckle, looking at how we react psychologically and physiologically to stressful situations and how these responses can affect outcomes like negotiations and creativity. She also studies workforce diversity, including the biases that affect the recruitment and retention of people of color and women in organizations.
To learn more about her work you can visit her website and listen to her TED Business podcast.
Patricia Jennings, PhD
Patricia (Tish) Jennings is a Professor of Education with the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. She is an internationally recognized leader in the fields of social and emotional learning and mindfulness in education. Her research places a specific emphasis on teacher stress and how it impacts the social and emotional context of the classroom. She is the author numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters and several books. You can learn more about Dr. Jennings work and connect with her here.
Paul Ekman, PhD
Paul Ekman, PhD is a world renowned psychologist who pioneered the field of studying human emotion as well as truth and deception. Paul was greatly influenced by Darwin's belief in a universality of emotions among humans and dedicated three decades of laboratory research to exploring these ideas. The 2000 meeting with His Holiness drastically altered Paul's research and world view, producing a series of academic articles on emotion and contemplative practice, co-designing the cultivating emotional balance training with Alan Wallace, and co-authoring a book with the Dalai Lama, Emotional Awareness. Paul and his daughter created the Atlas of Emotions at the request and with the support of His Holiness from 2014-2016.
You can find online training tools for emotion recognition and Global Compassion Webisodes with Paul Ekman on his website.
Resmaa Menakem
Resmaa Menakem, New York Times bestselling author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, is a visionary Justice Leadership coach, organizational strategist and master trainer. A leading voice in today’s conversation on racialized trauma, Resmaa created Cultural Somatics, which utilizes the body and resilience as mechanisms for growth. As a therapist, trauma specialist, and the founder of Justice Leadership Solutions, Resmaa Menakem dedicates his expertise to coaching leaders through civil unrest, organizational change, and community building. Resmaa’s embodied approach which he calls Somatic Abolitionism is a living, embodied philosophy that requires endurance, stamina, and discernment.
Richard Boyatzis, PhD
Richard E. Boyatzis is Distinguished University Professor of Case Western Reserve University. He graduated from MIT and Harvard. Richard has authored more than 200 articles and 9 books on leadership, competencies, emotional intelligence, competency development, coaching, neuroscience and management education, including the international best-seller, Primal Leadership with Daniel Goleman and Annie McKee and the recent Helping People Change with Melvin Smith and Ellen Van Oosten. His free online open enrollment courses on Coursera have over a million enrolled.
Richard Davidson, PhD
Richie Davidson’s research is broadly focused on the neural bases of emotion and emotional style and methods to promote human flourishing including meditation and related contemplative practices. He has published over 465 articles, numerous chapters and reviews, and edited 14 books. He is the author (with Sharon Begley) of The Emotional Life of Your Brain, published in 2012, and co-author with Daniel Goleman Altered Traits, published in 2017. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 and appointed to the Governing Board of UNESCO’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) in 2018.
To learn more about Dr. Davidson's work you can visit Center for Healthy Minds.
Robert Jagers, PhD
Robert J. Jagers is vice president of research at CASEL. Prior to joining CASEL, he was a faculty member in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology at the University of Michigan, a Co-PI of the Center for the Study of Black Youth in Context (CSBYC), and the founding director of Wolverine Pathways, a university-sponsored diversity pipeline program for qualified secondary school students. Among his various CASEL duties, Dr. Jagers is leading work with partner districts to explore how social and emotional learning can be leveraged to promote equitable learning environments and equitable developmental outcomes for students from historically underserved groups. He has a particular interest in participatory approaches to SEL research and practice and their implications for the civic development of children and youth.
Rev. Ronné Wingate Sims, DMin
Rev. Dr. Ronné Wingate Sims is a Baptist preacher who creates culturally relevant healing spaces for people working through trauma. She serves as Executive Minister at Imani Community Church (Oakland, CA) and is a frequent guest lecturer and workshop convener on the subject of trauma and mental health in the Black Community. She's also a meditation teacher for the Healthy Minds Innovations app. In January, Ronné was chosen as California’s Mother of the Year® 2021.
You can learn more about her work by visiting her website.
Sebene Selassie
Sebene Selassie is a teacher & author who guides people to remember and trust their belonging. Born in Ethiopia and raised in Washington DC, she began studying Buddhism 30 years ago as an undergraduate at McGill University. She has an MA from the New School, where she focused on race and cultural studies. She offers courses, workshops and retreats online and in person and teaches on the Ten Percent Happier meditation app. Her first book, You Belong: A Call for Connection is published by HarperOne.
You can learn more about her work on her website.
Shankari Goldstein
Shankari Goldstein is a 500 hour Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) and Regenerative Black Farmer. She has spent years connecting to breath, body, strength, movement, and energy to cultivate a holistic approach to being with the land. She is a Program Manager and host of the “Inspiring Minds Series” at the Mind & Life Institute, a Certified Yoga of Recovery Instructor, and an Accessible Yoga Ambassador. An avid race and environmental activist for over a decade, Shankari is an advocate for propelling the voices of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) or the Global Majority forward to share their embodied practices and wisdom.
Sona Dimidjian, PhD
Sona Dimidjian, Ph.D. is Director of the Renée Crown Wellness Institute and Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her current research projects focus on preventing depression and supporting wellness among new and expectant mothers, promoting healthy body image and leadership among young women, and enhancing mindfulness and compassion among youth, families and educators. She also has a longstanding interest in expanding access, scaling, and sustaining effective programs, using both digital technology and community-based partnerships. Dr. Dimidjian received her BA in psychology from the University of Chicago and her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Washington.
Thupten Jinpa, PhD
Thupten Jinpa, Ph.D has been the principal English translator to His Holiness the Dalai Lama since 1985, and has translated and collaborated on numerous books by the Dalai Lama. His own publications include A Fearless Heart: How the Courage to be Compassionate Can Transform Our Lives and translations of major Tibetan works. Jinpa serves as an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University and is the founder and president of the Institute of Tibetan Classics. Jinpa is the principal author of Compassion Cultivation Training™ (CCT©) developed while at Stanford University in 2009, and now disseminated through the Compassion Institute, which he co-founded in 2017. Jinpa was trained as a monk at the Shartse College of Ganden Monastic University, and also holds a B.A. in philosophy and a Ph.D. in religious studies from Cambridge University. He has been a core member of the Mind and Life Institute and its Chairman of the Board since January 2012.
Tsoknyi Rinpoche
For over 25 years Tsoknyi Rinpoche has been teaching students worldwide about the innermost nature of mind in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Widely recognized as an outstanding meditation teacher, he is the author of three books: Open Heart, Open Mind, Carefree Dignity, and Fearless Simplicity. Tsoknyi Rinpoche teaches worldwide at more than 50 retreat centers, and his most current humanitarian project is completing a large school for impoverished young girls in Nepal with both Western and traditional buddhist educational curriculums. Rinpoche has a keen interest in the ongoing dialogue between western research, especially in neuroscience, and Buddhist practitioners and scholars.
You can learn more about his work on his website and the Tsoknyi Humanitarian Foundation. You can also enroll in his Fully Being online course.
Wendy Hasenkamp, PhD
Wendy Hasenkamp, PhD, is a neuroscientist, contemplative practitioner, teacher, and writer who is interested in understanding how the mind and brain can be transformed through experience and practice to enhance flourishing. Her latest project is the Mind & Life podcast, where Wendy interviews leading experts in contemplative science to share different perspectives on how we investigate the mind, and how we might integrate contemplative wisdom to improve our lives and create a more connected society. In Charlottesville, Wendy enjoys dance, pottery, the outdoors, and anything DIY.
To learn more about Dr. Hasenkamp's work you can visit her website.
Yuria Celidwen, PhD
Dr. Yuria Celidwen (Indigenous Nahua and Maya) works on the intersection of Indigenous studies, cultural psychology, and contemplative science. She investigates the embodied experience of self-transcendence in world ecstatic and Indigenous traditions and how it enhances prosocial behavior. Her “Ethics of Belonging” thesis offers an earth-based ecology that engenders wellness and purpose through relational ecological awareness. She emphasizes the reclamation, revitalization, and transmission of Indigenous wisdom and the advancement of Indigenous and planetary rights.
To learn more about Dr. Celidwen's work you can visit her website.