Martine Batchelor was born in France in 1953. She was ordained as a Buddhist nun in Korea in 1975. She studied Zen Buddhism under the guidance of the late Master Kusan at Songgwang Sa monastery until 1984. Her Zen training also took her to nunneries in Taiwan and Japan. From 1981 she served as Kusan Sunim's interpreter and accompanied him on lecture tours throughout the United States and Europe. She translated his book 'The Way of Korean Zen'. Following Master Kusan's death she returned her nun's vows and left Korea. She returned to Europe with her husband, Stephen, in 1985. She worked as a lecturer and spiritual counselor both at Gaia House and elsewhere in Britain. She was also involved in interfaith dialogue and was a Trustee of the International Sacred Literature Trust until 2000. In 1992 she published, as co-editor, Buddhism and Ecology. In 1996 she published, as editor, Walking on Lotus Flowers which in 2001 was reissued under the title Women on the Buddhist Path. She is the author of Principles of Zen, Meditation for Life (an illustrated book on meditation), The Path of Compassion (a translation from the Korean, with reference to the original Chinese, of the Brahmajala Sutra, Women in Korean Zen and Let Go: A Buddhist Guide to Breaking Free of Habits. Her latest book is The Spirit of the Buddha. She leads meditation retreats worldwide and lives in France.
Loriliai Bernacki is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research interests include Hinduism, ethics, gender and the interface between religion and science. Her first book, Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex and Speech in Tantra (Oxford, 2007) won the Kayden Award in 2008. She is co-editor of Panentheism across the World's Religious Traditions (Oxford 2013). She is currently working on a study on the 11th century Indian philosopher Abhinavagupta within the framework of wonder, the new materialisms and ideas of the body and the body-mind interface.
Vidyamala Birch is an ordained member of the Triratna Buddhist Order as well as founder and co-Director of Breathworks, an organization devoted to offering mindfulness and compassion to people suffering from pain, illness and stress www.breathworks-mindfulness.org.uk
. Breathworks teachers now offer courses in over 20 countries. Vidyamala teaches and speaks internationally in both her Buddhist and Breathworks' roles. She specializes in mindfulness and compassion retreats and workshops. In 2008 she wrote Living well with Pain and Illness - the mindful way to free yourself from suffering; and in 2012 she co-authored Mindfulness for Health with Danny Penman (published as You are Not Your Pain in the USA). This won first prize in the BMA book awards 2014 in the 'Popular Medicine' category - clinical books aimed at the general public. She has also published a number of guided meditation CDs and DVDs. Vidyamala has been instrumental in initiating research projects that provide an evidence-base for the efficacy of the Breathworks' approach. This is guided by a board of respected academic leaders under the auspices of the Breathworks Foundation
. Breathworks grew out of Vidyamala's personal experience of managing chronic pain following spinal injuries and surgery in her teens. She learned mindfulness and compassion meditations when she was 25 and has used these over the subsequent 30 years to create a fulfilling quality of life, despite ongoing pain and disability.
Frank W. Bond is the Director of the Institute of Management Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research and consultancy seek to identify the processes by which Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), leadership,and organisational interventions improve productivity and well-being in the workplace. The ESRC, UK government, charities, and industry have funded his research, and the academic publications stemming from that research have been cited nearly 7,000 times in academic papers and books. Because of the ACT, randomised controlled studies he has published, the UK government, the British Olympic team, the BBC, and other private and public sector institutions have asked Professor Bond to consult with, and conduct ACT-related research in, their organisations. Professor Bond has been elected President and Fellow of the ACT-focused Association of Contextual Behavioural Science.
Sarah Bowen is an Assistant Professor at Pacific University in Portland, Oregon, and a licensed clinical psychologist. Over the past decade, her primary clinical and research interests have centered on mindfulness-based treatments for addictive behaviors. She has conducted several clinical trials examining effects of mindfulness-based interventions, as well as possible mechanisms underlying the change process, funded by the National Institute of Health. Currently, Dr. Bowen is working both locally internationally to provide training in mindfulness-based therapies to health professionals, and to assist in the adaptation of protocols to serve diverse settings, populations, and cultures. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Institute on Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Cancer Institute.
Linda E. Carlson holds the Enbridge Research Chair in Psychosocial Oncology and is Full Professor in Psychosocial Oncology in the Department of Oncology, Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary. Dr. Carlson trained as a Clinical Health Psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, researching the area of psychoneuroendocrinology. Her current research focuses on developing and testing complementary therapy interventions to help people cope with cancer. Dr. Carlson received the Kawano New Investigator Award from the International Psycho-Oncology Society in 2006; the William E. Rawls Prize in cancer control from the National Cancer Institute of Canada/Canadian Cancer Society in 2007; a New Investigator Award from the Canadian Psychological Association Health Section in 2009, the inaugural Research Excellence award from the Canadian Association of Psychosocial Oncology in 2010, the Arete Award for Research Excellence from the Department of Oncology at the University of Calgary in 2012, and was shortlisted for the Dr. Rogers Prize in Complementary and Alternative Medicine in 2013. She is a fellow of the Society for Behavioral Medicine and the Mind and Life Institute. Dr. Carlson's research in Mindfulness-Based Cancer Recovery has been published in many high-impact journals and book chapters, and she published a patient manual in 2010 with Michael Speca entitled: Mindfulness-Based Cancer Recovery: A step-by-step MBSR approach to help you cope with treatment and reclaim your life, in addition to a professional training manual in 2009 with Shauna Shapiro entitled The Art and Science of Mindfulness: Integrating mindfulness into psychology and the helping professions. She has published over 150 research papers and book chapters in the area of psycho-oncology, holds several millions of dollars in grant funding and is regularly invited to present her work at international conferences.
James Carmody studied and practiced in the Zen, Tibetan, Theravada and Advaita traditions in a number of countries for over forty years. He is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and has been principal investigator on several NIH-funded clinical trials of the effects and mechanisms of mindfulness and other mind body trainings. He has been a therapist, an instructor in the UMass Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, and Director of Research for the UMass Center for Mindfulness. Instead of a dharma narrative, he places human angst in the adaptive attending processes resulting from evolutionary and biological imperatives, and describes the psychological mechanisms by which mindfulness, and other mind body and psychotherapeutic modalities, operate to recognize and counter these default processes in reducing distress. He also teaches courses for clinicians with the goal of making the conceptualization and practice of mindfulness and mind body processes clear and jargon-free, so that they can be meaningfully introduced in the context of a typically brief patient visit and be practicably accessible in the lives of patients. His work has been featured in national and international media including the New York Times, NPR, and ABC. He also enjoys building in stone.
Guy Claxton is a cognitive scientist who writes about mind, body, creativity and learning. Much of his work has been in education, trying to persuade schools to weave the building of positive learning habits and attitudes ('Building Learning Power') into everyday lessons and school activities. As a cognitive science writer, his books concern the importance of unconscious and bodily underpinnings of human intelligence. The latest book in this field is Intelligence in the Flesh: Why Your Mind Needs Your Body Much More Than It Thinks. He has also written about Buddhism and the relationship between Eastern religious traditions and contemporary psychology over many years. He is retired from full-time university life, being now a Visiting Professor of Education at King's College London and Emeritus Professor of the Learning Sciences at the Centre for Real-World Learning, University of Winchester. He is the author of a dozen well-respected books on the mind, including Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less (1997), Wise Up: The Challenge of Lifelong Learning (1999), and The Wayward Mind (2005). His Building Learning Power approach has influenced youngsters' lives throughout the UK as well as in Singapore, Sweden, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. Guy Claxton holds degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, and is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Haley Douglas was introduced to Vipassana meditation 2008 in a college course on Behavioral Neuroscience. She eagerly sought out other resources on meditation and completed a course in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. Given the personal changes in stress that Haley noticed, she began working in several labs investigating the effects on mindfulness on health and substance use. Now as a graduate student in Clinical Psychology, Haley continues her meditation practice to bolster her health and wellbeing. Additionally, she has attended several retreats and continues to work in the field of mindfulness and health.
Juliane Eberth studied psychology at Technische Universität Chemnitz from 2005 to 2010. Her diploma thesis comprised a meta-analysis of the effects of meditation on psychological variables, for which she received an award from the German MBSR-MBCT association. After receiving her diploma she started working on her dissertation that deals with the effects of mindfulness meditation. This research is being financed by a scholarship of the Free State of Saxony. Together with Peter Sedlmeier she published two meta-analyses on the effects of meditation in general and on the effects of mindfulness meditation.
Matthew Enkema is a predoctoral student of Clinical Psychology at the University of Washington. His interests include treatment for addiction, craving, and mechanisms of action in mindfulness-based treatments for addiction. He began formal meditation practice in 2007, informed primarily by the Theravada tradition, and has been working with individuals struggling with substance use problems and addiction since 2011.
Paul E. Flaxman is a Senior Lecturer in Organisational Psychology at City University London. He has previously held research and teaching positions at London Guildhall University and Goldsmiths College (University of London). While at Goldsmiths, he helped to implement a series of work redesign interventions for improving staff well-being in financial services and local government organisations. Dr Flaxman was also involved in two separate research projects designed to promote and develop the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) Management Standards for work-related stress. He is currently the Programme Director of City's Organisational Psychology Group. Dr Flaxman specialises in adapting cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT) interventions to help improve employees' psychological health. Most notably, he has taken a prominent role (alongside Professor Frank Bond) in developing and evaluating acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) as a worksite training intervention.
Erin Harrop is a social welfare doctoral student at the University of Washington School of Social Work. She graduated with her Master in Social Work in 2014 from the University of Washington, after completing her clinical internships at Seattle Children's Hospital Adolescent Medicine Clinic and at Fairfax Hospital. Her primary clinical interests include women's mental health, particularly issues of eating disorders, substance abuse, and size-related stigma. Erin is also completing a teaching practicum with the Skillful Meditation Project, and believes in the integration of mindfulness practices into her therapeutic work.
Tatyana Kholodkov completed her Bachelor's in psychology at the University of Wyoming and her Master's in Experimental Psychology at Old Dominion University. She is currently a clinical psychology intern at the Durham VAMC, where much of her direct patient care involves implementation of mindfulness interventions. She anticipates completing her Clinical Psychology Ph.D. from the University of Wyoming by August 2015, and shortly thereafter starting a full-time clinical psychology post-doctoral fellowship through Integrative Medicine at Duke Medical Center. Her research interests include difficulties with emotion regulation (and behaviors such as non-suicidal self-injury), treatment outcome studies, and the role of mindfulness in psychotherapy. She enjoys helping those who she works with to find fulfillment in life and attend to holistic wellness. She maintains a personal mindfulness meditation practice in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, and is also a practitioner of yoga. In her free time, you can find her wandering in wilderness, cooking for others, and hanging upside-down on aerial silks.
Joda Lloyd is a lecturer and researcher in occupational psychology at Goldsmiths' Institute of Management Studies (IMS). She is a chartered psychologist with the British Psychological Society (BPS), and a registered occupational psychologist with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC). Dr Lloyd's research focuses on the application of a contextual cognitive-behavioural theory, known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and its underlying mechanism of change, psychological flexibility, to workplace health and performance. Major projects have included the application of ACT-focussed psychological skills interventions to improving client-focussed attitudes and burnout in the human services, as well as the development of new methods to assess psychological flexibility in the workplace. More recent projects concern the application of ACT-based technologies to performance coaching in the workplace, as well as examinations of how ACT and psychological flexibility can inform our understanding of minority status, identity management and prejudice and discrimination in the workplace. Dr Lloyd regularly presents on her research in both UK and international conferences, and is involved in a number of special interest groups and societies concerned with the promotion and dissemination of ACT-focussed research and practice.
Maika Puta studied psychology at the Technische Universität Dresden from 2005 to 2010 and specialized in applied health psychology afterwards. Since 2011 she is a PhD candidate at the Technische Universität Chemnitz carrying out research on the Three-Guna-Modell from Indian Psychology. This research is being financed by a scholarship of the Foundation of the German Economy. She has published a chapter on the Gunas (with Peter Sedlmeier) in the book Meditation:
Neuroscientific approaches and philosophical implications (Springer Press 2014). Since 2015 she is the head of the Sattva Center in Berlin which offers seminars relevant to psychological health.
Antonino Raffone completed a Ph.D. in Psychology at the Sapienza University of Rome, and the European Diploma in Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He holds a position of Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology of the Sapienza University of Rome. Both research and teaching of Dr. Raffone are mainly focused on consciousness, attention and mindfulness, and their neural correlates, with different methods of investigation. Dr. Raffone has been author of several international research articles on these topics and related aspects, including publications in the "Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ", "Psychological Review ", and "Consciousness and Cognition ". In particular, he has edited a theme issue of "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B " on perceptual awareness. He is active in promoting practice of mindfulness and meditation in several contexts, including prisons, and related research. He has organized several national and international events about mindfulness, and directs the Master in "Mindfulness: Practice, Clinical Applications and Neuroscience " at the Sapienza University of Rome. Dr. Raffone started to study and practice Buddhism and meditation in 2004 with Prof. Peter Harvey, and then became a dedicated Soto Zen Buddhist practitioner (with Ven. Dario Doshin Girolami), tradition in which he received a lay ordination in 2009. He also assists Henk Barendregt in Vipassana meditation retreats.
Corey Roos is currently a doctoral student in clinical psychology at the University of New Mexico and his mentor is Dr. Katie Witkiewitz. He is interested in mindfulness-based interventions for substance use disorders, the application of technology in the delivery of empirically-supported treatments, and the role of emotion regulation in alcohol and substance use behavior change.
Peter Sedlmeier is professor of psychology at the Technische Universität Chemnitz. There, he is mainly teaching research methods and cognitive psychology. Apart from being involved in meditation research, together with his group, he conducts research in music psychology, psychology of time, special aspects of psycholinguistics and judgment under uncertainty. He has held positions at the University of Salzburg, the University of Chicago, the University of Münster, and the University of Paderborn, and has spent several of his sabbaticals at Pondicherry University, India.
Jason S. Thompson was born in England and as an undergraduate studied English Language and Literature at Oxford University. After university for six years he researched and produced documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4 in London. Following emigration to the United States in 1999, he taught at public elementary, middle and high schools in inner city Oakland, California, prior to embarking on a PhD clinical psychology at Palo Alto University, California, with emphases on the psychology of meditation and community mental health. His dissertation ( "Neural and linguistic correlates of decentering in focused attention and open monitoring meditation ") examined the neurophenomenology of meditation-related self-awareness changes, using data he collected in a research assistant capacity from a National Institutes of Health-funded fMRI study of meditation and hypnosis at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is currently completing his predoctoral internship in the child and adolescent services multicultural clinical training program in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, based at San Francisco General Hospital.
Lynn C. Waelde is a professor at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology of Palo Alto University and a consulting professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is director of the Inner Resources Center, a specialty clinic of the Gronowski Psychology Center, and Director of the Meditation and Psychology Area of Emphasis in the clinical psychology Ph.D. program at Palo Alto University. Dr. Waelde's clinical and research interests focus on therapeutic applications of mindfulness and meditation and on predictors and manifestations of stress disorders. Dr. Waelde developed the Inner Resources program so that the powerful techniques of mindfulness, mantra, and meditation could be adapted to meet the specialized needs of people with health and mental health issues. As an affiliated scholar of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation, Dr. Waelde works collaboratively to integrate trauma and mindfulness perspectives into peacebuilding. Dr Waelde is a New Orleans native who received a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's degree in anthropology from Louisiana State University. She received a doctorate in Developmental Child Clinical Psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She completed a predoctoral internship at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in New Orleans, where she completed training as a posttraumatic stress disorder specialist. Dr. Waelde has been a lifelong student of hatha yoga and meditation.
Katherine Weare is Emeritus Professor at the University of Southampton, and Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Exeter. She is known internationally for her work on mental health, well-being, and social and emotional learning in schools, including mindfulness and compassion. She has published widely in the field, engaging in research projects, reviewing the evidence base on 'what works', advising policy makers and developing practical strategies in schools. Her book 'Developing the Emotionally Literate School' remains a best seller in the field. She was a key player developing the UK's national whole school SEAL (social and emotional aspects of learning) programme. She continues to develop and evaluate cutting edge work and is currently working with mindfulness programmes such as the Mindfulness in Schools Project, the Plum Village Community, and Mind and Life to develop and evaluate new programmes and approaches, and is advising agencies such as the EU, WHO, and the UK government on ways forward. She is on the core development group of an international network, SMiLE, the School Mental Health Leadership Exchange. As an adoptive parent she is currently working with key agencies developing new work on mindful parenting, including in connection with attachment and trauma.
Michael West is Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at Lancaster University Management School, Senior Fellow at The King's Fund in London, Senior Fellow of The Work Foundation and Emeritus Professor at Aston University. He was formerly Executive Dean of Aston Business School. He graduated from the University of Wales in 1973 and received his PhD in 1977 for work on The Psychology of Meditation. He has authored, edited or co-edited 25 books including The Psychology of Meditation (1987); The Psychology of Work and Organizations (2010); The Essentials of Teamworking: International Perspectives (2005);; Effective Teamwork (2012) the first edition of which has been translated into 12 languages; The International Handbook of Organizational Teamwork and Cooperative Working (2003). He has also published over 200 articles for scientific and practitioner publications, as well as chapters in scholarly books. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the American Psychological Association (APA), the APA Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology, The Academy of Social Sciences, the International Association of Applied Psychologists, the British Academy of Management and a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. His areas of research interest are team and organizational innovation and effectiveness, particularly in relation to compassionate cultures and leadership of health services. He lectures widely both nationally and internationally about the results of his research on reflexivity, meditation, mindfulness, culture, compassion and leadership and his solutions for developing effective and innovative organizations.
Katie Witkiewitz is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of New Mexico with a joint appointment at the Center on Alcoholism, Substance Abuse, and Addictions. The underlying theme of her research is the development of empirically-based models of substance use, with an emphasis on applying advanced quantitative research methods to better understand changes in substance use behavior over time. Dr. Witkiewitz is also a licensed clinical psychologist and has worked extensively on the development of a theoretical model of biopsychosocial influences on substance use relapse. This research has led to her collaborative work on the development and evaluation of mindfulness-based relapse prevention for substance use disorders. She has conducted numerous empirical studies on the prediction of alcohol relapse following treatment for substance use disorders, mechanisms of successful alcohol treatment outcomes, as well as the development of interventions to prevent alcohol and substance use relapse. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Institute on Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Cancer Institute.
