Faculty
Present will be eight leading faculty in the field of compassion research and 30 promising graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who wish to advance their knowledge and dedicate their research to the scientific inquiry of compassion. Applications to the Institute will be carefully reviewed to ensure the highest academic caliber of participant attendants. We are presently screening applications for the remaining faculty positions. Faculty and participants will come from a variety of academic disciplines: neuroscience, behavioral science, psychology, economics, and biomedical research. The following have accepted our invitation to participate as faculty.
Clifford Saron, Ph.D., is an Associate Research Scientist at the Center for Mind and Brain and M.I.N.D. Institute at the University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1999 studying the electrophysiology of interhemispheric visuomotor integration under the direction of Herbert Vaughan, Jr. Dr. Saron has had a long-standing interest in brain and behavioral effects of meditation practice and has been faculty at the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute and is currently a member of the Program and Research Council of the Mind and Life Institute. In the early 1990's he was centrally involved in a field research project investigating Tibetan Buddhist mind training in collaboration with Jose Cabezón, Richard Davidson, Francisco Varela, Alan Wallace and others under the auspices of the Private Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama and the Mind and Life Institute. Currently, in collaboration with Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace and a consortium of over 30 scientists and researchers at UC Davis and elsewhere, he is Principal Investigator of The Shamatha Project, a unique longitudinal study of intensive meditation training based on the practice of meditative quiescence (shamatha) and cultivation of the four immeasureables (loving kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity). The project, focused on changes in attention-related skills and emotion regulation, is the most comprehensive multimethod study to date regarding the potential effects of long-term intensive meditation practice on basic mental and physical processes related to cognition, emotion, health physiology, and motivation. His other primary research interest focuses on investigating brain and behavioral correlates of sensory processing and multisensory integration in children on the autistic spectrum.
James Doty, MD, is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University and the Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education as Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed his undergraduate training at the University of CA, Irvine and medical school at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, LA. He trained in neurosurgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and did a fellowship in neuroelectrophysiology. His research interests initially were on the use of evoked potentials to assess neurological function during operative procedure and more recently have focused on the development of technologies using focused beams of radiation in conjunction with robotics and image-guidance techniques to treat solid tumors and other pathologies in the brain and spinal cord. During residency, he developed a proprietary electrode for monitoring brain function that continues to be used today. He has also invented technologies for use in spine and peripheral nerve surgery. As director of CCARE, he has collaborated on a number of research projects focused on compassion and altruism including the use of neuroeconomic models to assess altruism, use of the CCARE developed compassion cultivation training in individuals and its effect, use of implanted brain electrodes to assess compassionate and altruistic judgment and the use of optogenetic techniques to assess nurturing pathways in rodents. Presently, he is developing collaborative research projects to assess the effect of compassion training on immunologic and other physiologic determinates of health, the use of mentoring as a method of instilling compassion in students and the use of compassion training to decrease back pain.
Emma Seppala, Ph.D. is the Associate Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. Emma completed her undergraduate degree at Yale University, and her graduate studies Columbia University and Stanford University. Her doctoral research focused on interventions to increase compassionate behavior and social connectedness. Emma completed her post-doctoral research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Dr. Richard Davidson where she evaluated the effects of yoga- and meditation-based interventions for combat veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. Her research fields of expertise include compassion, emotion regulation, happiness, and mind-body interventions for well-being. In addition to research, Emma often writes and speaks on these topics.
Stephanie Brown is an Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at SUNY Stony Brook and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. She received a B.S. degree in Psychology from the University of Washington, and a Ph. D. in Social Psychology from Arizona State University. She completed a 2-year N.I.M.H. postdoctoral training program in “Psychosocial Factors in Mental Health and Illness” at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Following her postdoctoral training, Dr. Brown received a research scientist career development award (K-01) to study whether dialysis patients who provide social support to others suffer fewer symptoms of depression. This project led to a series of empirical papers conducted with fellow Center faculty member Dylan Smith, suggesting that the health benefits of social contact are due to the provision, as opposed to the receipt, of social support. Dr. Brown spent three years as an Assistant Professor on the faculty in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at SUNY Stony Brook in December 2009. Dr. Brown’s research currently focuses on the neuro-affective mechanisms underlying altruistic and prosocial behavior and she has a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to examine the physiological consequences of helping others. Together with center member, Dylan Smith, Dr. Brown’s research examines (a) the role that other-focused motivational states play in stress regulation (b) the implications of helping-induced stress-regulation for physical health and longevity and (c) the contribution of other-focused motivational states and behaviors to the darker side of human experience including depression, suicidality, and PTSD. These lines of research are designed to shed light into the mechanisms underlying a caregiving motivational system, including its evolutionary origins and its implications for compassionate care, medicine, economic behavior, ethnic and international conflict, and other political attitudes and behaviors.
Margaret Cullen is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Teacher. She has also trained with Zindel Segal in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and in MB Eat with Jean Kristeller. For twenty years she has been teaching and pioneering mindfulness programs in a variety of settings including cancer support, HIV support, physician groups, executive groups, obesity, college students and Kaiser patients. For ten years she has been involved in teaching and writing curricula for several research programs at UCSF including "Cultivating Emotional Balance" designed for teachers and "Craving and Lifestyle Management with Meditation" for overweight women. In 2008 she launched a mindfulness-based emotional balance program for teachers and school administrators in Denver, Boulder, Ann Arbor and Vancouver, B.C. She has also been a facilitator of support groups for cancer patients and their loved ones for twenty years at The Cancer Support Community and is currently a senior teacher at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, where she co-authored the Compassion Cultivation Training. A meditation practitioner for over thirty years, she is a frequent contributor to "Inquiring Mind" and is currently writing a book for New Harbinger Publications on Mindfulness and Emotions.
Daryl Cameron earned his B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy from the College of William and Mary in 2006, and will receive his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from UNC Chapel Hill in 2013. In fall 2013, Daryl will become an assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Iowa. Daryl has two primary lines of research. First, he focuses on the causes and consequences of compassion. He has shown how our tendency to feel more compassion for one victim than many victims is driven by fear of compassion and emotion regulation. He has also examined how regulating compassion can create its own costs by changing moral identity and moral principles. His other line of research explores the affective dynamics of moral judgment. He has shown how emotional awareness can enable more informed moral decisions, and how automatic and controlled emotional processes interact to shape moral judgments and decisions to help others. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation.
Brooke Dodson-Lavelle is the Senior Research Officer for the Mind and Life Institute's new Compassion and Secular Ethics Initiative. She is also completing her PhD in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. Her work focuses on the confluence of Buddhist contemplative theory and cognitive science, as well as the cultural contexts that shape the transmission, reception and "secularization" of Buddhist contemplative practices. She is currently completing her dissertation, entitled “Cultivating Compassion and Mindfulness: The Rhetoric of Secular Buddhist-based Practices in America”.
Brooke is a lead instructor for several studies examining the efficacy of Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT), and has helped to develop and adapt CBCT for school children as well as adolescents in Atlanta’s foster care system. In 2010 she helped developed the CBCT Teacher Training Program, and now serves as the Associate Training Director.
Brooke also served as the Program Coordinator for the Emory-Tibet Partnership and from 2009 to 2011 co-led the Emory Tibetan Mind/Body Sciences Summer Study Abroad program in Dharamsala, India. Prior to attending Emory, she earned her B.A. in Religion and Psychology at Barnard College and her M.A. in Religion at Columbia University. While at Columbia, she also worked as a Research Coordinator for the Columbia Integrative Medicine Program, where she developed and taught mindfulness-based meditation programs for a variety of clinical populations.
Timothy Harrison is a Senior Teacher of Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) at Emory University. He co-leads the CBCT Teacher Training Program, and leads CBCT courses for college students and teenagers in foster care. He has been studying and practicing various forms of meditation, including Rinzai Zen and Tibetan lojong, for over 20 years.
Tim is also a Visiting Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Architecture. He has a Masters from the Harvard Design School ('94) and B.S. from Duke's School of Engineering ('89). His two lively children, ages 7 and 10, continue to give good reason for deepening his practice of compassion.
Gaëlle Desbordes, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging within the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and a visiting scholar at Boston University. Trained as a neuroscientist (PhD, Boston University) and with a background in engineering and computer science, her current research focuses on the neuroscientific investigation of meditative practices—including compassion meditation—using brain imaging (functional MRI) and physiological measurements of the autonomic nervous system. She is the recipient of a Francisco J. Varela Research Award from the Mind and Life Institute for her ongoing study of the neural and physiological correlates of advanced meditation practices. She is herself an experienced meditation practitioner with a particular interest in traditional contemplative methods for cultivating loving-kindness and compassion (e.g., Tibetan “mind training” or lo-jong methods). For the past four years she has worked in collaboration with Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi (Emory University) and Charles Raison (University of Arizona) on the Compassion and Attention Longitudinal Meditation (CALM) study, a longitudinal study that examines how Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) affects emotional processing in the brain and the regulation of physiological responses to psychosocial stress. She is also on the neuroscience faculty at the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative—an ongoing effort overseen by HH the Dalai Lama aimed at implementing a comprehensive and sustainable science education program for Tibetan monks and nuns.
Emiliana Simon-Thomas earned her doctorate in Cognition Brain and Behavior at UC Berkeley. Using behavioral, EEG and fMRI methods, her dissertation examined how negative states like fear and aversion influence thinking and decision-making.
During her postdoc, Emiliana moved into the positive terrain to study care/nurturance, love of humanity, compassion and awe under the mentorship of Dacher Keltner. From signaling, perceiving and self-reporting of emotions to peripheral autonomic and neural indices of emotion to understanding the psychosocial benefits of emotional authenticity and connection, Emiliana continues to examine the potential for enhancing everything pro-social.
Previously the Associate Director/Senior Scientist at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, Emiliana joins the Greater Good Science Center with great enthusiasm for her hometown, Berkeley and heartfelt ambition to support and grow Greater Good Science to new heights, widths and depths!
Dr. Heineberg is a clinical supervisor for therapists in training and lecturer for Palo Alto University, as well as Applied Psychological Interventions Associate at CCARE. His work is informed by his training in Compassion Focused Therapy and evidence based principles to explore new routes towards healing via compassion practices. Dr. Heineberg’s passion has been finding effective methods for healing the cycle of violence with compassion. With collaborators Drs. Rony Berger and Philip Zimbardo, he has been implementing “ERASE-Stress-Pro-Social”, a school-based, teacher mediated program that reduces post traumatic distress and increases pro social engagement in warzones and inner cities. They have recently completed data collection on an international project to examine the processes of heroic transformation from violence to peacemaker among former gang members, and Israeli and Palestinian former combatants who now work to make peace in their communities. These pilots will inform future compassion trainings in school systems worldwide. Dr. Heineberg is also passionate about scalable technology based interventions to increase wellbeing and compassion. He recently developed VBT (Values and Behavior Tracking), a web based program that emphasizes a healing integration of positive values with kind behaviors. He also works with his collaborator Dr. Dan Martin in order to develop additional technology tools to increase wellbeing and pro-sociality in a variety of settings, ranging from clinical populations, to school systems and workplace environments. Dr. Heineberg earned his undergraduate degree in psychology and comparative literature at Tel Aviv University. He completed his doctorate in clinical psychology at the PGSP-Stanford consortium focusing on the cycle of violence, trauma and aggression, and applied scalable interventions to increase psychological wellbeing, and compassion for self and others. He recently completed his post-doctoral fellowship with CCARE, where he has focused his energy on developing compassion interventions, as well as leading the Stanford Compassion In Action student volunteer initiative in East Palo Alto.
Clifford Saron, Ph.D., University of California - Davis
James Doty, M.D., Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, Stanford University
Emma Seppala, Ph.D., Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, Stanford University
Stephanie Brown, Ph.D, Stony Brook University
Margaret Cullen, MFT, Senior Teacher at the Center For Compassion And Altruism Research And Education, Stanford University
Daryl Cameron, Ph.D., CCARE Fellow
Brooke Dodson-Lavelle, Senior Teacher of Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT), Emory University
Timothy Harrison, Senior Teacher Of Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT), Emory University
Gaëlle Desbordes, Ph.D., Research Fellow At The Athinoula A. Martinos Center And Harvard Medical School And A Visiting Scholar At Boston University
Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Ph.D., The Greater Good Science Center, University of California - Berkeley
Yotam Heineberg, PsyD, API Associate (Applied Psychological Interventions)