|
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
SPEAKERS
|
 |
| |
|
|
Books by Andereck on Books.Google.com |
|
WILLIAM ANDERECK, MD
Director of California Pacific Medical Center’s Program in Medicine and Human Values
William S. Andereck, MD is the Medical Director of California Pacific Medical Center’s Program in Medicine and Human Values, which he co-directs with his long time colleague, Dr. Jonsen. The CPMC Medical Staff appointed him to chair the hospital’s Ethics Committee at its inception in 1985, a role he still fills.
He has practiced General Internal Medicine in San Francisco since 1979. He received his undergraduate degree at Vanderbilt University and his medical degree from the University of Tennessee in 1974. There he was introduced to medical ethics by Drs. Edmund Pellegrino and David Thomasma.
He moved to San Francisco to serve his internship and residency at California Pacific Medical Center and received his board certification in Internal Medicine in 1978. In the early 1980's he studied with Albert Jonsen, Ph.D., Professor of Bioethics at the University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. Andereck has served the medical community in his own hospital, at the level of his local medical society, and in a leadership position in the California Medical Association. The members of the San Francisco Medical Society’s elected him to its Board of Directors for over 10 years. For two consecutive terms (1995 and 1996) Dr. Andereck served as editor of San Francisco Medicine, the monthly magazine of the Medical Society.
On a statewide basis, he has served on the California Medical Association’s Council on Ethical Affairs as either a member, chair of consultant since 1990. During the CMA’s annual session in March of 1996, he was elected as the first chair of the statewide delegation and later, its President. He is now a Trustee of the California Medical Association.
Dr. Andereck lives in San Francisco with his wife, Helga, and their three children. His community interests include a long standing affiliation with youth soccer and a ten year term as Director of the San Francisco Zoo. For eight years he served as Chair of the Exhibit Committee, which was charged with designing and overseeing the construction of over seventeen animal habitats. |
|
|
|
 |
|
SUJATHA BALIGA
Soros Justice Fellow with Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth
Baliga was drawn to restorative justice through her work involving crime victims and the accused. After working with survivors of domestic violence, rape, and child sexual abuse, she became an appellate public defender, most recently in death penalty cases. Baliga is a consultant to the Stanford Criminal Justice Center and has taught Restorative Justice at New College School of Law and the California Institute for Integral Studies. She is frequently invited to address groups of prisoners and restorative justice programs. Baliga also serves as volunteer counsel to the Liberation Prison Project, an organization dedicated to assisting Buddhist prisoners. She earned her BA from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, her JD from the University of Pennsylvania, and has held two federal clerkships. Her research interests include victims’ voices in restorative justice practices, the forgiveness of seemingly unforgivable acts, and Tibetan notions of justice. |
|
|
|
 |
|
MONIKA BROECKER
Independent leadership development and personal growth consultant and former head of Google University's School of Personal Growth
Monika earned her MS in Communication from the University of Arts in Berlin, Germany. She moved to the US in 1998 to pursue training in therapy. Between 1998 and 2003, she was trained at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto in problem solving Brief Therapy and at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee in solution-focused brief therapy. Monika co-authored a book with the bio-physicist and cybernetician Heinz von Foerster and co-edited two double volumes of the scientific journal Kybernetes: one on Heinz von Foerster and another on Gregory Bateson. She also co-edited a book on Leadership. Monika now works for Google, heading up Google University's School for Personal Growth. The School for Personal Growth's mission is to develop Googlers as whole human beings and helping them reach their full potentials on all levels: emotional, mental, physical and beyond the self. Monika frequently goes to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California to recharge. |
|
|
|
 |
|
DAN BRYANT, MA
President, NetNow
Dan teaches behavioral health classes including Stress Management, Depression Management, Couples Communication, Anger Management and Forgiveness. He has a BA in English which facilitates his interest how individuals to frame beliefs to increase or reduce impediments to achieving their goals. He holds a Masters in Psychology with an emphasis on language and its use to make possible or impede self mastery.
He has facilitated organizational development projects for Fortune companies; created, developed and led seminar programs for health insurers; and in 1985 - 1990 coordinated a joint venture development project between NetNow and the Peoples Revolutionary Council of Taishan, China.
He works in Prisons where he has discovered that freedom can exist inside or outside those walls. Imprisonment is as much a product of mindset as it is of place.
Dan will speak on how widespread beliefs are impediments to meaningful relationship and show how we limit our happiness by defining successful relationship in impossible terms. Forgiveness and authentic communication are an underlying necessity if we are to bridge the rifts in relationship. |
|
|
|
Science for Raising Happy Kids website |
|
CHRISTINE CARTER, PhD
Executive Director, Greater Good Science Center, University of California, Berkeley
Christine Carter is the executive director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and the creator of the “Science for Raising Happy Kids” website. She is a sociologist who studies the childhood roots of happiness. Carter received her B.A. from Dartmouth College, where she was a Senior Fellow, and her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Her first book, The Other Side of Silence, has been dubiously recognized as one of the books most frequently stolen out of university libraries, and is now often housed in special collections with feminist theory.
Carter has worked in marketing management, as a school administrator, and as an innovation consultant for Fortune 500 companies. She has appeared on Oprah and other talk shows, been a key-note speaker at Harvard and numerous other schools and professional groups, and been featured in dozens of local and national magazines and newspapers. She has two children and lives with her family outside of San Francisco. |
|
|
|
Tara Redwood School website |
|
PAMELA CAYTON
Educator, founder of Tara Redwood School
In 1972, Pamela Cayton attended the Melbourne School of Art and Decorating, in Australia and established her own design business. In 1978 she traveled to India and Nepal to study Asian philosophy and religion. She studied and worked in Nepal from 1978-1988 as an English teacher and translation instructor for the Buddhist monks and professors. She organized courses in Buddhist philosophy and meditation for western students and established The Himalayan Buddhist Meditation Center in Kathmandu. In 1989 she moved to the United States and embarked on her Montessori training with the Montessori World Education Institute and during this period established a Preschool in Soquel, California. In 1996 the Preschool expanded into a Kindergarten and Elementary school, of which Pamela was the director, teacher and the principal curriculum developer. She presently trains teachers in this unique educational approach. Tara Redwood School is the leading pilot school in the west for the development of Essential Education.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
CARLYLE COASH, MA, BCC
Spiritual Care, Bereavement and Artist
Carlyle has spent the last eight years working as a chaplain, with a focus in end of life practice. This has been intertwined with training in the arts and an adventurous mind. From a life in the theatre his path shifted after the death of his mother towards one that incorporated service more directly. After gaining a Master’s Degree in Socially Engaged Buddhism from Naropa University, he moved into the training and the work of a hospice chaplain. He has worked both in Colorado and California and currently works with Kaiser San Jose Medical Center and the Zen Hospice Project. Carlyle also works to support the work of Palliative Care around the world through film and advocacy projects aimed at raising awareness for the care of others at the end of life. He is currently working on a short film to support World Hospice and Palliative Care Day, whose theme this year is Palliative Care as a Human Right.
Carlyle is the Section Leader for the Spiritual Caregiving Section of the National Council for Hospice and Palliative Professionals, which is a support and advocacy group connected to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. He is also part of the Ethics Committee for that organization. He has presented both nationally and internationally at conferences, with a focus on spiritual care, resilience and healing. He is Board Certified through the Association of Professional Chaplains and was the first Tibetan Buddhist practitioner to be designated as such. Included in this work as a chaplain is the ongoing collaboration in a project called Organic MD, which strives to support a practice of holistic healing. |
|
|
|
 Liberation Prison Project website
RobinaCourtin.com website
8 videos on YouTube.com
Robina Courtin on Wikipedia.com
Talks on Zencast.org
Talks on Lamrim.com
Talks on Archive.org
Books edited by Courtin on Books.Google.com
Buddhism Behind Bars interview in Common Ground
Chasing Robina interview on The Spirit of Things (radio)
Courtin profile on Compass: Key to Freedom (Australian tv) |
|
ROBINA COURTIN
Executive Director, Liberation Prison Project
I was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1944. When I was little, I decided at Mass that I wanted to be a priest. I must have been very little, because when everyone laughed and explained that I couldn't be, I simply didn't understand the logic: it was clear that it was my job. Reluctantly I accepted, and decided to be a nun instead. When I was 12, I begged my mother, on bended knees, to let me be a Carmelite like my great hero St. Therese of Lisieux. I cried when she said no.
Twenty years later, she cried when I told her I planned to be a nun after all – a Buddhist nun. “I wish I'd let you be a nun when you wanted to be!” she said.
Clearly my connection with monasticism runs deep. And my twelve years at Sacre Coeur, a Catholic convent, played a big part in this. Because I was rebellious and proud, I had a hard time at school, but I am forever grateful for the emphasis on the importance of morality and integrity: this education gave me the infrastructure of my life.
I lived in at school the last two years there. After the emotional turmoil of a household of seven children, my very own space was like a mansion, and the unfamiliar order and discipline allowed me to discover my intellectual potential for the first time (having failed most of my exams until then, I got 94 in history one year!). And I could go to Mass seven mornings a week. It was my first taste of monastic life, and it was heaven.
Bud sadly my spiritual aspirations were not evident to my kind teachers, the nuns, who saw only my bad behavior. I was never allowed to join any of the religious groups that we called “Congregations.” “Why can't they see how much I love Our Lord and Our Lady!” I would cry to myself.
A 7" l.p. of Billie Holliday – “I wonder who “he” is?” I thought – bought for sixpence at the school fete when I was 15, opened me up to a whole new world: my spiritual aspirations began to take on social and political dimensions.
I left school when I was 16 (I didn’t finish my education), and when I was 19 I gave up God, happily choosing boys and drugs instead.
My mother persuaded me to continue my classical singing education (she'd been my teacher for ten years) in London when I was 23. But it was 1967 and I was ready and ripe for revolution. A hippie first, I was soon working full time in radical left politics. I really found my political identity as a feminist and, back in Melbourne in 1972, was part of the burgeoning movement there.
By the time I was 30, after eight intensive years of trying to bash the world into the shape I thought it should be, I began to look for something spiritual again. It was clear that I'd have to stop hating the rest of the human race. When I was a hippie, I blamed straight people for the suffering in the world; as a lefty, I blamed the rich; as a defender of blacks, I blamed whites; and as a feminist I blamed men. There was no one left but me!
I went back to Mass and tried various types of meditation, but they didn't fit. In 1976, after a couple of years of martial arts, I landed at a course on Buddhism in Queensland given by two Tibetan lamas, Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. I'd come home! By now, I'd given up sex, drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, so the logical next step was to be a nun – finally! Eighteen months later I took ordination, at the lamas’ monastery, Kopan, in Kathmandu.
For the first ten years I worked as editorial director of Wisdom Publications, in London; and for the last twenty-plus years I've taught Buddhist philosophy and meditation around the world.
As editor of an international Buddhist magazine, Mandala, since 1996 (the magazine of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, the organization of my teachers), I'd receive letters from people in prison interested in studying Buddhism. That activity has grown into Liberation Prison Project, which takes care of the spiritual needs of thousands of inmates in the USA, Australia and other countries. I’m now based in San Francisco.
Amiel Courtin-Wilson, my nephew, showed some of our work in his film Chasing Buddha; and Vicki Mackenzie has me talking about it in her book Why Buddhism? (Allen & Unwin, Melbourne).
These people in prison are a huge inspiration to me: people with nothing good in their lives, and nothing to look forward to, having the courage to find themselves and learn to give to others – the job I'm attempting to do, too. |
|
|
|
 |
|
MARGARET CULLEN, MFT
Group facilitator, instructor and innovator of mindfulness-based curricula
Margaret Cullen is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Teacher. She has taught over seventy-five series of MBSR in thirteen years and trained in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy with ZindelSegal. In 2004, she helped develop, write, and then teach the curriculum for the research project Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB). CEB teaches mindfulness and emotional regulation to teachers. Through this process she worked closely with Paul Ekman, Alan Wallace and Jon Kabat-Zinn. Since its inception, she has taught CEB to seven cohorts of teachers and school administrators in the US and Canada. She has taught MBSR for the past twelve years at Kaiser in Oakland, where she introduced the first physician program, the first graduate program and helped revise the MBSR curriculum and workbook for the entire northern California region. In 1993, she introduced the MBSR program to The Wellness Community National Headquarters in Santa Monica and continues to teach cancer patients and their loved ones at The Wellness Community in Walnut Creek, California. A frequent contributor to "The Inquiring Mind", Margaret has been practicing meditation for 28 years. |
|
|
|
 |
|
JAMES R. DOTY, MD, FACS
Clinical Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University and the Founder and Director of Stanford's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education
Dr. Doty is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University. 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 served in the U.S. Army where he completed his neurosurgical training at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
In addition to being a neurosurgeon, Dr. Doty is also an inventor, entrepreneur and philanthropist, having given support to a number of charitable organizations including Children as the Peacemakers, Global Healing and Family & Children Services. These charities support a variety of programs throughout the world including those for HIV/AIDS support, blood banks, medical care in third world countries and peace initiatives. Additionally, he has endowed chairs at major universities including Stanford University School of Medicine in the basic neurosciences and at his alma mater, Tulane University School of Medicine where he endowed the Chair of the Dean of the School of Medicine following hurricane Katrina.
Dr. Doty is the Founder and Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University where he works with both the Stanford Neurosciences Institute and a variety of scientists from a number of disciplines examining the neural, moral and social bases for compassion and altruism. He is on the Board of Directors of a number of non-profit foundations including the Dalai Lama Foundation, the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and the Friends of New Orleans. |
|
|
|
Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics website |
|
BEN EILAND
Director of Integrated Care Center Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics, San Francisco
Ben Eiland has been in the Health Care field for over 33 years. He is currently the Director of the Integrated Care Center for the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, in San Francisco.
He is the founder and former Co-Director of Integrated Counseling and Consulting Services specializing in domestic violence and substance abuse problems. Previously has held positions as the director of inpatient and outpatient chemical dependency treatment programs that serve both adults and adolescents.
Ben has been a trainer and consultant in such areas as chemical dependency treatment, co-occurring disorders treatment, domestic and workplace violence, drugs in the workplace, conflict resolution/team building and cultural/gender diversity.
Ben has taught at a variety of educational institutions and is currently an Adjunct Faculty Member at J. F. K. University in Orinda and College of San Mateo.
Ben has been a Certified Employee Assistance Professional. He has held the position of Vice President for the Cross Roads Chapter of E. A. P. A. He has been a member of the California Association of Addiction Recovery and both the National and California Associations of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counselors. Formerly on the board of the California Association of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counselors (CAADAC), and the past Charter Vice President of the California Association of Drug and Alcohol Educators (CAADE), and currently the Northern California VP. He participated in the State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Programs committee to Re-engineer Substance Abuse Treatment in California. He is a member of the State ADP Aging and Addiction Constituent, and is a member of the National SAMHSA Recovery Month Committee.
Ben of Apache and Mexican descent has been a consultant and educator on the topic of addiction and the Native American, historical and cultural trauma for the American Indian Training Institute. |
|
|
|
PulEkman.com
Books by Ekman on PaulEkman.com
Articles by Ekman on PaulEkman.com
Downloadable articles by Ekman on PaulEkman.com
|
|
PAUL EKMAN, PhD
Among the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century
Ekman was born in 1934 in Washington, DC, and grew up in Newark, New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, and Southern California. He is the son of a pediatrician.
He received a Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1971, which was renewed in 1976, 1981, 1987, 1991, and 1997. For over forty years, NIMH supported his research through fellowships, grants, and awards.
In 2001, Ekman collaborated with John Cleese for the BBC documentary series The Human Face. He retired in 2004 as professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
Contrary to the belief of some anthropologists including Margaret Mead, Ekman found that facial expressions of emotion are not culturally determined, but universal to human culture and thus biological in origin, as Charles Darwin had once theorized. Ekman's finding is now widely accepted by scientists. Expressions he found to be universal included those indicating anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. Findings on contempt are less clear, though there is at least some preliminary evidence that this emotion and its expression are universally recognized.
Ekman reported facial “microexpressions” that he showed could be used to reliably detect lying, in an effort called the Diogenes Project. He also developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to taxonomize every conceivable human facial expression. Ekman conducted and published research on a broad variety of topics in the general area of non-verbal behavior. His work on lying, for example, was not limited to the face, but also to observation of the rest of the body.
In his profession he also uses verbal signs of lying. When interviewed about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he mentioned that he could tell Clinton was lying because he used distancing language.
Ekman is currently on the Editorial Board of Greater Good Magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley. Ekman's contributions include the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships.
Ekman is working with Computer Vision researcher Dimitris Metaxas on designing a visual lie-detector.
Ekman has also contributed much to the study of social aspects of lying, why we lie, and why we are often unconcerned with detecting lies.
Paul Ekman was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and New York University. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Adelphi University (1958), after a one year internship at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute. After two years as a Clinical Psychology Officer in the U.S. Army, he returned to Langley Porter where he worked from 1960 to 2004. His research on facial expression and body movement began in 1954, as the subject of his Master's thesis in 1955 and his first publication in 1957. In his early work, his approach to nonverbal behavior showed his training in personality. Over the next decade, a social psychological and cross-cultural emphasis characterized his work, with a growing interest in an evolutionary and semiotic frame of reference. In addition to his basic research on emotion and its expression, he has, for the last thirty years, also been studying deceit.
Currently, he is the director of the Paul Ekman Group, LLC (PEG), a small company that produces training devices relevant to emotional skills, and is initiating new research relevant to national security and law enforcement.
In 1971, he received a Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health; that Award has been renewed in 1976, 1981, 1987, 1991, and 1997. His research was supported by fellowships, grants and awards from the National Institute of Mental Health for over forty years.
Articles reporting on Dr. Ekman's work have appeared in Time Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Psychology Today, The New Yorker and others, both American and foreign. Numerous articles about his work have also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and other national newspapers.
He has appeared on 48 Hours, Dateline, Good Morning America, 20/20, Larry King, Oprah, Johnny Carson and many other TV programs. He has also been featured on various public television programs such as News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and Bill Moyers' The Truth About Lying. |
|
|
|
David Feldman's website
The End of Life Handbook |
|
DAVID FELDMAN, PhD
Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology, Santa Clara University, co-author, End of Life Handbook
David Feldman was born in Cincinnati and raised in Dayton, Ohio. He received his B.A. in psychology from DePauw University, through which he had the opportunity to spend several months studying in Spain, one of the most rewarding times in his life. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Kansas, and completed an internship and postdoctoral fellowship in the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. His interests include positive psychology, health psychology, posttraumatic stress, and cognitive-behavioral therapy. The central question that inspires his research and clinical work is: How do people facing considerable adversity maintain a sense that life is meaningful? His research concerns ways in which coping is influenced by positive-psychology constructs such as hopeful thinking, meaning-making and posttraumatic growth, as well as the development of therapeutic interventions based on such constructs. He is particularly interested in exploring those phenomena in patients confronting medical stressors such as spinal cord injury, cancer, congestive heart failure, and other chronic and/or terminal conditions. He has published widely and presented work at national and international conferences. In his leisure time, Feldman enjoys photography, cooking, cozy coffee shops, running by the ocean, spending time with good friends, and watching Mexican soap operas. |
|
|
|
Flanagan on duke.edu
Books by Flanagan on books.google.com
Flanagan on wikipedia.org
Flanaan discusses mind and reality (video) |
|
OWEN FLANAGAN, PhD
Professor of Neurobiology, Philosophy Department of Duke University
Owen Flanagan, James B. Duke Professor and Professor of Neurobiology
Owen Flanagan (PhD 1977, Boston University) joined the Duke faculty in 1993 as Chair of the Department of Philosophy. He also holds appointments in Psychology and Neurobiology and is a Faculty Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience.
He was previously Class of 1919 Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Wellesley College.
During the 1985-86 academic year, he was a visiting member of the Department of Philosophy at Duke University.
He has also had visiting positions at Brandeis, Princeton, Harvard, and La Trobe in Melbourne, Australia as well as several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In 1993-94 Flanagan was President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
In 1998, he was recipient of the Romanell National Phi Beta Kappa award, given annually to one American philosopher for distinguished contributions to philosophy and the public understanding of philosophy.
In 1999, he was invited by the Mind and Life Institute to attend a small conference in Darhamsala, India with the Dalai Lama on the topic of “Destructive Emotions.” A book on the meetings, Beyond Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Collaboration With the Dalai Lama narrated by Daniel Goleman, appeared in 2003. |
|
|
|
Gina Gibney Dance |
|
GINA GIBNEY
Artistic Director, New York City female dance company
Gina Gibney is the Founder and Artistic Director of Gina Gibney Dance, a community action dance company with a dual mission: to create and perform contemporary choreography that draws upon the strength and insights of women, and to enrich and reshape lives through programs that give voice to communities in need.
Gibney’s work has been widely presented and commissioned in the United States and abroad at such venues as Danspace Project, The Duke on 42nd Street Theater, Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum, White Bird Dance, Yale Repertory Theater, Joyce SoHo, Central Park SummerStage, Symphony Space, The Joyce Theater's Altogether Different series, Joe's Pub and DanceNOW NYC, Kaatsbaan International Dance Center, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Cleveland Public Theatre, the New York platform of the Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine Saint-Denis, L'Agora de la Danse (Montréal), Maison de la Culture Frontenac (Montréal), Maison de la Culture Rosemont (Montréal), Gibraltor Point Center for the Arts (Toronto), and elsewhere. Gibney’s work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and numerous prestigious foundations, corporations and individuals.
In 1997, in response to Gina Gibney's growing concern that women in professional dance were losing artistic and financial ground, the company was reconceived as an all-female troupe. Since then, Ms. Gibney and her company have developed a repertory of over six evening length works that explore the humanity and physicality of women: Coming from Quiet (1998), Objects No Longer Present (2000), Several Truths (2001), Time Remaining (2002), Thrown (2004) unbounded (2005) and The Distance Between Us (2007).
In 2000 she launched the innovative Domestic Violence Project that offers dance and creative expression to women who are survivors of domestic abuse. Since then, her company has also developed Moving the Community, a project for individuals affected by HIV/AIDS, and Keep Moving! a program of movement and creativity for youth at risk. She is the founder of Studio 5-2, an officer of Danspace Project's Board of Directors, and a trustee of Dance/USA. Gibney graduated with honors and received an MFA in Dance from Case Western Reserve University. Individuals who have influenced her work include Kathryn Karipides, Kelly Holt, Mark Morris, Jocelyn Lorenz, and the many gifted performers with whom she has worked. |
|
|
|
Goldin on Google Tech Talks
|
|
PHILIPPE GOLDIN, PhD
Head of Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience Group, Stanford University
Philippe Goldin is a research scientist and heads the Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience group in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University.
He spent 6 years in India and Nepal studying various languages, Buddhist philosophy and debate at Namgyal Monastery and the Dialectic Monastic Institute, and serving as an interpreter for various Tibetan Buddhist lamas. He then returned to the U.S. to complete a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University. His NIH-funded clinical research focuses on (a) functional neuroimaging investigations of cognitive-affective mechanisms in adults with anxiety disorders, (b) comparing the effects of mindfulness meditation and cognitive-behavioral therapy on brain-behavior correlates of emotional reactivity and regulation, and (c) training children in family and elementary school settings in mindfulness skills to reduce anxiety and enhance compassion, self-esteem and quality of family interactions.
|
|
|
|
Harrington on harvard.edu
Books by Harrington on books.google.com
Harrington on NPR.com (audio)
Q&A with Harrington in the Boston Globe
Harrington on salon.com
Harrington on slate.com |
|
ANNE HARRINGTON, PhD
Chair, Professor of History of Science, Harvard University
Anne Harrington, Chair, is Harvard College Professor and Professor for the History of Science, specializing in the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and the other mind sciences. She is also Visiting Professor for Medical History at the London School of Economics, where she co-edits a new journal called Biosocieties.
Professor Harrington received her Ph. D. in the History of Science from Oxford University, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London, and the University of Freiburg in Germany. For six years, she co-directed Harvard's Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative. She also was a consultant for the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mind-Body Interactions. Currently she serves on the Board of the Mind and Life Institute, an organization dedicated to cross-cultural dialogue between Buddhism and the sciences.
She is the author of two books: Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain (1987) and Reenchanted Science (1997). A third book, Stories under the Skin: Mind-Body Medicine and its Histories, will be published by W. W. Norton. She has also published many articles and produced a range of edited collections including The Placebo Effect (1997), Visions of Compassion (2000), and The Dalai Lama at MIT (2006). She is currently also working on a project that attempts to make historical and cultural sense of the rise of a genre of literature in our own time concerned with the “inner world” of brain disorder.
Professor Harrington's courses at Harvard include HS 175, Madness and Medicine, HS 177, Stories under the Skin (the basis for her forthcoming book), HS 176, Evolution and Human Nature, HS 171, Narrative and Neurology, HS 275, The Minded Body (graduate), and HS 278, In Search of Mind (graduate). She also teaches a research methods course for undergraduates, and oversees the department's undergraduate track in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. She is the mother of a fabulous three-year old boy named Jamie. |
|
|
|
Garrison Institute website |
|
PATRICIA JENNINGS, MEd, PhD
Director of the Garrison Institute's Initiative on Contemplation and Education
Dr. Patricia (Tish) Jennings is Director of the Garrison Institute's Initiative on Contemplation & Education and works with educators and scientists to help improve school environments, boost academic achievement, and support social and emotional development, especially for students exposed to risk factors such as poverty, violence, and divorce. Dr. Jennings has spent over thirty years promoting well-being and happiness in educational environments as a Montessori teacher, school administrator, teacher educator, and researcher. She received her doctorate in human development from the University of California, Davis and holds a research appointment with the Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development at Penn State University.
Previously she was affiliated with San Francisco State University and the University of California, San Francisco where she directed the Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB) project. Dr. Jennings is currently completing the Cultivating Emotional Balance in the Classroom (CEBC) project to examine how greater well being and emotional competence among teachers resulting from the CEB training may translate into improved teacher-student relationships, increased student pro-social behavior, and a more positive classroom atmosphere. Dr. Jennings heads an interdisciplinary team developing and testing Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE), a professional development intervention for teachers that focuses more directly on improving classroom climate and educational outcomes.
Forthcoming in the journal Review of Educational Research is an extensive theoretical article co-authored by Dr. Jennings and Dr. Mark Greenberg presenting the Prosocial Classroom Model that highlights the importance of teachers’ social and emotional competence and well-being to their ability to provide social, emotional, and instructional support to their students.
|
|
|
|
Thupten Jinpa on NPR.com (audio)
Institute of Tibetan Classics website
|
|
THUPTEN JINPA, PhD
Principal translator for the Dalai Lama; Visiting Scholar in Stanford Neuroscience Institute’s Project Compassion
Thupten Jinpa was born in Tibet in 1958. He received his early education and training as a monk at Zongkar Chöde Monastery in South India and later joined the Shartse College of Ganden monastic university, South India, where he received the Geshe Lharam degree. He taught Buddhist epistemology, metaphysics, Middle Way philosophy and Buddhist psychology at Ganden for five years. Jinpa also holds B.A. Honors in Western Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies, both from Cambridge University, UK.
Since 1985 he has been a principal English translator to H.H. the Dalai Lama and has traveled extensively in this capacity. He has translated and edited more than 10 books by the Dalai Lama including Healing Anger, Dzogchen, Path to Bliss, The World of Tibetan Buddhism, The Good Heart: The Dalai Lama Explores the Heart of Christianity, and the New York Times bestseller Ethics for the New Millennium. His own works include numerous contributions to various collections and academic journals and several works in Tibetan language. His latest works are Tibetan Songs of Spiritual Experience (co-edited with Jas Elsner), and Self, Reality and Reason in Tibetan Thought: Tsongkhapa's Quest for the Middle View.
From 1996 to 1999, he was the Margaret Smith Research Fellow in Eastern Religion at Girton College, Cambridge University, UK. At present he is the president of the Institute of Tibetan Classics in Montréal, Canada, and the editor-in-chief of the translation project The Library of Tibetan Classics, being developed by the Institute. He is on the advisory board of various educational and cultural organizations such as the Mind and Life Institute (USA), The Orient Foundation (UK & India), The Meridien Trust (UK), Global Ethics and Religion (USA), and Manjushri Buddhist Online Community. He lives in Montréal with his wife and two young daughters.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
DACHER KELTNER, PhD
Professor of Psychology University of California, Berkeley
Dacher Keltner received his BA in Psychology and Sociology from UC Santa Barbara in 1984 and his PhD in Social Psychology from Stanford University in 1989. He then was a post-doctoral fellow for three years at UC San Francisco working with Paul Ekman. In 1992 he took his first academic job, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and then returned to Berkeley’s Psychology Department in 1996, where he is now a full professor.
Dacher’s research focuses on the biological and evolutionary origins of human goodness, with a special concentration on compassion, awe, love, and beauty, as well as the study of power, status and social class, and the nature of moral intuitions. Dacher is the co-author of two best selling textbooks, one on human emotion, the other on social psychology, and in January, 2009, will publish Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, with WW Norton Publishers, which makes the case for an evolutionary approach to the emotions that promote human goodness. Dacher has published over 100 scientific articles, and has received numerous national prizes and grants for his research, and for his teaching and mentoring was selected as the Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor in 2002, and the Outstanding Teacher, Division of Social Sciences, in 2002 as well. Dacher also serves as the Director of the Berkeley Greater Good Science Center, where he serves as co-editor of the center’s magazine, Greater Good. Dacher lives in Berkeley with his wife, an alumna of Berkeley, and their two daughters. |
|
|
|
 |
|
COREY KEYES, PhD
Associate Professor of Sociology, Emory University, Atlanta
Corey Keyes is associate professor of Sociology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, including editing four books and special editing two journal issues. His research centers on illuminating the “two continua” model of health and illness, showing how the absence of mental illness does not translate into the presence of mental health, and revealing that the biological and social causes of true health are often distinct processes from those now understood as causes of illness, which means that the matter of promoting better health is not simply reducing those things we know to cause illness. This work is being applied to better understanding resilience in minority populations, and to prevent mental illness through promotion. Moreover, the two-continua model and research informs the growing healthcare approach called “predictive healthcare,” which seeks to map an monitor true (physical and mental) health and to develop and apply novel responses to correct early deviations to it to maintain health and limit chronic disease and illness.
Dr. Keyes’ 2002 article on the “Mental Health Continuum: From Languishing to Flourishing in Life” that was published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior was recognized by Barbara Gentile and Benjamin Miller, editors of the 2008 reader published by Sage and entitled The History of Psychological Thought, as the most recent addition to the classics in the history of psychology.
Dr. Keyes has given over 60 national and international presentations, keynotes, and talks to government officials and policymakers. During the past two years, Dr. Keyes gave public lectures in Scotland, England, Northern Ireland, Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, and South Africa. He is giving the 3rd Annual Gottschalk Lecture for Rochester New York and the Mental Health Association in May of 2008, will keynote a conference at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester (MN) in June of 2008, and will be a featured speaker at the statewide prevention conference in November of 2008 for the Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Providers of New York.
Corey arrived at Emory University in 1997 after spending one year as a MacArthur Post-doc in Aging at the University of Wisconsin. He was, from 1994 through 2002, a member of a MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Midlife Development, was a founding steering committee member in 2001 of the interdisciplinary society on Research on Human Development and its official journal, and was co-chair in 1999 of the first summit of Positive Psychology (along with the CEO of the Gallup Organization and the President of the American Psychological Association). In 2005, he was one of two of the annual invited Presidential Plenary speakers for the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Keyes is currently a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory, where he is a core member of the “Pursuit of Happiness” 5-year project funded by the $1. 5 million grant from the Templeton Foundation.
He was invited and participated in the 2007 National Academies of Science Keck Future’s Initiative on The Future of Human Healthspan: Demography, Evolution, Medicine and Bioengineering. Corey contributed to the World Health Organization’s publication on Mental Health Promotion Worldwide, and continues to consult and work with the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), Public Health Canada, and the United Kingdom’s National Health Service regarding mental health and its promotion in children and adults. He is currently the only non-European scholar who is a member of the World Health Organization’s Reference Group that is producing a scoping paper on mental health as a determinant for the WHO of Europe and the Mental Health Foundation of the UK.
His model of mental health as a complete state is being adopted by Public Health Canada into its national surveillance program in all Canadian Provinces, and he is currently working with Senior Advisors (Larke Huang and Gail Ritchey) on children’s mental health to the Director at SAMHSA to create programs and research on positive mental health. He is also currently consultant to the S. Engelhard Center and the American Association for Universities and Colleges on its “College Outcomes” project, and is Co-PI on a proposed “College Outcomes Longitudinal Study” to study the effects of liberal education on college students’ mental health and academic achievement. Dr. Keyes is currently a collaborator on four nationally representative studies: the “Child Development Supplement” (which is part of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics) to study the role of mental health in positive youth development, the MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) longitudinal follow-up on successful aging, the MESS panel study in the Dutch Population (with Gerben Westerhof at University of Nijmegen), and the FORT (“Fortology”) Study in South Africa (with Marie Wissing, Project Director, Northwest University in Potchefstroom, South Africa). |
|
|
|
Karuna Hospice Services |
|
YESHE KHADRO
Executive Director, Karuna Hospice, Australia
Yeshe Khadro is the Director of Karuna Hospice Services, a registered charity and public benevolent institution in Brisbane whose ‘hospice-at-home’ palliative and ‘holistic’ care services assists terminally ill people and their families. Yeshe comes from a diverse background of nursing, teaching, Buddhist devotion, project management and organisational management. She has served as Director of Chenrezig Institute (a Buddhist training centre) and worked for the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT). |
|
|
|
The End of Life Handbook |
|
ANDREW LASHER, MD
Director of Palliative Medicine at California Pacific Medical Center San Francisco, co-author The End of Life Handbook
Dr. Andrew Lasher is the director of palliative medicine at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, where he is also the medical director of home hospice and home care for Sutter Visiting Nurses and Hospice. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Stanford Hospital and Clinics in Palo Alto, California, followed by a fellowship in palliative medicine within the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. He is co-author of The End-of-Life Handbook: A Compassionate Guide to Connecting with and Caring for a Dying Loved One, a practical and emotional guide for family members of terminally ill patients. |
|
|
|
 |
|
GIA MARAMBA, PhD
Psychologist, Mental Health Clinic Coordinator, VA Palo Alto Health Care System
Gia Maramba was born and raised in the Philippines. She received an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of the Philippines. After immigrating to the United States, trying her hand in research and development on Wall Street, as an art consultant in Soho in New York City, and as Information Systems Manager at a "Seven Sisters" university, she came full circle and completed a master's degree in psychology from Kent State University, and her doctoral degree in psychology from the Pennsylvania State University.
She completed an internship and postdoctoral fellowship in the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, where she has been the Mental Health Clinic Coordinator since 2005.
What continues to intrigue in Psychology is how what transpires between two people sitting in a room, "just talking," can result in sustained meaningful change, for at least one of them. She has examined this issue from the perspective of psychotherapy as a cultural encounter, to how specific momentary interactions can predict the failure or success of the therapeutic relationship. Fundamentally, she believes in the power of relationships to transform lives.
She derives much joy from her own relationships with family, friends, her husband, Daniel, and her pooch, Lucile. |
|
|
|
 |
|
MELISSA MATHISON
Award-wining screenwriter of ET and Kundun, lifestory of the Dalai Lama
The daughter of a journalist father and part-time publicist mother, Melissa Mathison grew up in the Hollywood Hills. Producer-writer-director Francis Ford Coppola was a family friend for whose children she baby-sat as a youth. The young Mathison also worked as a stringer for TIME magazine – her father was a friend of a bureau chief. She took time off from pursuing a degree in political science at the University of California at Berkeley to work for Coppola as an assistant on “The Godfather, Part II” (1974). By the time of Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979), Mathison was credited as executive assistant. The celebrated filmmaker urged her to try her hand at screenwriting. The result was “The Black Stallion” (1979), based on Walter Farley’s classic children’s novel about a boy and his horse, which she co-scripted with two other writers. Hailed in some quarters as a modern children’s classic, the film won kudos for both its sensitive adaptation and supremely cinematic storytelling.
Mathison was dating the still-rising star Harrison Ford when he traveled on location to film “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981). During this arduous shoot, director Steven Spielberg approached her about writing a screenplay dealing with a little alien who gets stranded on Earth. Eight weeks later she had completed the first draft of “E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial”. Mathison and Ford wed the March after “E.T.” opened. She spent most of the next decade or so as a homemaker, with a brief excursion to TV to script “Son of the Morning Star” (ABC, 1991), a miniseries biopic about General George Custer starring Gary Cole.
Mathison returned to feature screenwriting after a 13 year hiatus to adapt Lynne Reid Banks’ children’s novel “The Indian in the Cupboard” (1995). The project reunited her with “E.T.” producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall as well as some of the stylistic and thematic hallmarks of that earlier triumph. Mathison was a natural choice to pen the story of a young boy who discovers that his wooden cabinet has the magical power to bring his toys to life. He learns about another culture and the dignity of all living things after placing a plastic Indian inside. Once again, Mathison revealed a sharp ear for how children speak and a dedication to grounding the fantastic elements of her story in a realistic context. She also retained her knack for conjuring up the private world of little boys. “The Indian in the Cupboard” opened to extravagant reviews and modest box office. Destined to find the bulk of its audience on video, the film debuted at number one on both the rentals and sales charts.
Mathison followed up with a more traditionally “adult” project for producer-director Martin Scorsese, scripting Kundun, a biopic of His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lamai of Tibet, who was forced into exile in 1959, nine years after the Chinese invasion. Melissa is the mother of Georgia and Malcolm. Divorced, she now lives in New York City. |
|
|
|
|
|
SAYAKA MATSUMOTO
Seven-time senior national judo champion, a member of the 2008 USA Olympic team
Sayaka Matsumoto was born in Japan and raised in the Bay Area. She began studying the martial art of judo at the young age of 5, under the instruction of her father, David Matsumoto. Sayaka, a seven-time senior national champion, has had the opportunity to represent the United States at three World Championships and the 2003 Pan American Games. Most recently she was named to the 2008 Olympic Team after defending her number-one seed at the Olympic Trials this past June. A graduate of UC Berkeley with a degree in Mass Communications, Sayaka currently resides in El Cerrito, California and works at an after-school program. She also teaches judo classes at San Francisco State University and the East Bay Judo Institute, where she also trains. |
|
|
|
 |
|
DARRIN MCMAHON, PhD
The Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University
Darrin M. McMahon is the Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida
State University. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley
and Yale, where he received his PhD in 1997, McMahon is a specialist
in European culture and thought, with an emphasis on the eighteenth
century. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University,
and the University of Rouen, France. His books include Enemies of
the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of
Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Happiness: A History
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), which has been translated into eleven
languages, and was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by
the New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate Magazine, and the
Library Journal. McMahon's writings have appeared in such
publications as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the
Washington Post, Daedalus, The Wilson Quarterly, and the New
Republic's “Open University,” where he is a regular contributor. He
is currently writing a history of the idea of genius in Western
thought, under contract with Basic Books. |
|
|
|
 |
|
ROSS MIRKARIMI, MSc
Board of Supervisors, San Francisco, co-founder California’s Green Party
Mirkarimi's ethnic and cultural background is Iranian and Russian Jewish-American. He was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1961 and grew up in Rhode Island. He has a Bachelor's degree in political science from St. Louis University, a Master's degree in international economics and affairs from Golden Gate University, and a Master of Science degree in environmental science from the University of San Francisco. He has lived in San Francisco since 1984.
Besides co-founding California's Green Party in 1990, Mirkarimi coordinated Ralph Nader's 2000 presidential campaign in California. He also managed local campaigns in San Francisco, including the 2001 campaign for public power, the March 2002 campaign to elect Harry Britt to the State Assembly, the November 2002 campaign to re-elect Supervisor Chris Daly, and the 2003 campaign to elect Matt Gonzalez mayor of San Francisco.
Mirkarimi has been involved in these civic and community service activities: Director for SF Nuclear Freeze Zone Coalition; union negotiator for DAI Association union; member of the IFPTE Local 2; member of the Harvey Milk Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Democratic Club; member of the Iranian-American Chamber of Commerce; environmental analyst for the Harvard Study Team (Iraq) Bayview Hunters Point, California Base Closures; and member of the National Organization for Women (NOW).
As Supervisor, Mirkarimi sponsored legislation to require police foot patrols in high-crime neighborhoods. The Board of Supervisors approved this measure, but Mayor Gavin Newsom, citing objections by Police Chief Heather Fong, vetoed it. However, by a 9-2 vote, the Board overrode the veto; this was the first time that the Board of Supervisors had overridden a Newsom veto.
In March 2007, Mirkarimi introduced legislation that prohibits certain chain stores (mainly supermarkets and drugstores) from providing customers with non-biodegradable plastic bags, making San Francisco the first city to regulate such bags. Mirkarimi said, “Instead of waiting for the federal government to do something about this country's oil dependence, environmental degradation or contribution to global warming, local governments can step up and do their part. The plastic bag ban is one small part of that.” Many supermarkets opposed such legislation. The bill passed 10-1 and became an ordinance.
As a supervisor, Mirkarimi has made a name for himself by spearheading efforts to promote medical marijuana clubs in San Francisco. On April 20, 2006, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws honored Mirkarimi with its Rufus King Award for outstanding leadership in the reform of marijuana laws.
Mirkarimi was instrumental in the effort to extend San Francisco's ban on smoking tobacco at bus shelters to the city's public golf courses. Not extending the law to golf courses, Mirkarimi declared, “has this undertone of elitism.”
In February 2008 Mirkarimi announced his support for changing the name of a portion of Eddy Street to Marcus Garvey Way. The section of Eddy under consideration, from Van Ness Avenue west to Divisadero Street, runs through the heart of the Western Addition, the Fillmore District, and the largest concentration of public-housing projects in the city. The purported rationale for this plan is to increase pride among the area's large African-American population. Supporters hope that by renaming a street in honor of a well-known and influential figure of African descent San Francisco's African-American residents will choose to stay in the city. (Because of the high cost of living, itself the result of gentrification brought on by the dot-com and housing bubbles, African-Americans now comprise fewer than 10 percent of San Francisco's total population.)
Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi was elected in November 2004 and represents District 5, which encompasses the Haight-Ashbury, parts of Hayes Valley, Western Addition, Alamo Square and a portion of the Inner Sunset neighborhoods. |
|
|
|
KRON website |
|
PAM MOORE
Award-winning KRON 4 television news anchor
Pam Moore anchors KRON 4 NEWS AT 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. Moore joined KRON 4 in March 1991 as an anchor and general assignment reporter. In December 1991, she was named anchor of “KRON 4 News at 11.” In 1993, Moore was assigned to report on medical issues for “4 Your Health” segments. From 1994 to 1997, she served as host of “Health Matters,” a half-hour health awareness program.
Before joining KRON 4, Moore worked at WBZ-TV in Boston, where she was an anchor and general assignment reporter. Prior, she was a general assignment reporter at KCBS-TV in Los Angeles.
Moore began her broadcasting career as a news reporter at WJLB Radio in Detroit. She had a brief television job in Toledo, Ohio, before moving to WHAS-TV in Louisville and then to Dallas station KXAS-TV, where she was an anchor on the noon and 5:00 p.m. newscasts.
Moore’s work on KRON 4’s 1998 five-part news series “About Race” garnered a number of awards, including a prestigious George Foster Peabody Award, the Pew Center Batten Prize for Civic Journalism, an In-Depth Reporting Award from the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, top honors from the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame and Best Documentary Award from the California Associated Press Television Radio Association.
In addition to her awards for “About Race,” Moore has earned several other honors. In 1997, she was nominated for two Northern California Emmy awards for her medical reports “Diets Don’t Work” and “The Brain.” In February 2000, Moore received the California Journalism Award from California State University, Sacramento, in the category of Television Special Feature/Enterprise Reporting for the ten-part news series on HMOs, “Who Owns Your Health.” In May 2000, she received a Northern California Emmy Award for “Who Owns Your Health.” Moore was the recipient of an Associated Press Television-Radio Association award for Best Investigative Reporting in 2001 for “Mercury Rising.” And her 2001 series “Don’t Call Me Crazy,” earned the Outstanding Journalism Award for the California Chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and was nominated for an Emmy Award. Moore also won a Pubby award in 2005 from the San Francisco Bay Area Publicity Club for the Best Bay Area Anchor.
In past years, Moore served on the board of the Black Journalists Association of Southern California, and also vice president for broadcast for the National Association of Black Journalists. She is a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Bay Area Black Journalists. Moore is also a former board member of San Francisco’s Stern Grove Music Festival.
Her community service has earned several awards. In 1989, she was honored by the Big Sisters Association, an organization that she volunteered with in various cities for nearly ten years. Moore received the Bay Area Black Media Coalition’s Beverly Ann Johnson Media Award in 1994, the 1995 Distinguished Community Service Award from the YMCA of the East Bay and the 1996 Wiley Manuel Law Foundation Award for Outstanding Community Service. She was also honored with an award from the African American Advocates in 1997 for her work mentoring an Oakland public school student, and was the first recipient of the San Francisco NAACP Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Civic Rights Award in 1998. In 2001, Moore won the 100 Black Men of the Bay Area Community Service Award, and in 2002 she received a supporter award from the East Oakland Youth Development center.
She currently volunteers with the summer program at the East Oakland Youth Development Center. She is also on the board of Friends of Faith, an organization which raises grant money for Bay Area organizations which serve low income and underinsured women who are diagnosed with breast cancer.
A native of Detroit, Moore graduated from the University of Michigan, where she earned a degree in Radio/Television and Film. |
|
|
|
Sources of Affective Vulnerability or Resilience website |
|
WIVEKA RAMEL, PhD
Postdoctoral researcher and clinician at the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology at Stanford University
Wiveka Ramel, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher and clinician at the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology at Stanford University. She completed her doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology at University of California San Diego and San Diego State University and her Clinical Psychology Internship at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration. Her research interests are centered on the interplay between affect and cognition and their neurobiological correlates, with specific focus on memory, rumination, acceptance, mindfulness and emotion regulation in major depression. She is currently conducting research on how genetic and environmental factors influence the way people process emotional information, and why some people have increased or decreased risk for mood and anxiety disorders. Her clinical interests are influenced by humanistic-existential and Eastern philosophies, and she is trained in a variety of clinical approaches, including cognitive-behavioral and interpersonal therapies, with favorites being Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and mindfulness-based approaches. |
|
|
|
Psychology Today website |
|
LAWRENCE ROSE
President, Psychology Today
Lawrence Rose is President of Sussex Publishers LLC, a New York City-based multi-media company. The company publishes Psychology Today magazine (300,000 circulation) and online Professional Directories listing over 21,000 professionals in 15 different professional disciplines. The major directories include: The Therapy Directory, Healthprofs.com and BuildingPros.com.
In the 12 years Lawrence Rose has been at Sussex the company has "morphed" from a traditional magazine publishing company with four titles (Country Music, Mother Earth News, Spy and Psychology Today magazine), to a multi-media company whose primary focus is helping consumers find the (professional) help they need, online.
The catalyst for creating online professional directories came with the realization that, particularly as it related to finding a therapist, the marketplace was deeply flawed by confusion over "whom to see" and the stigma of "looking for help."
Prior to joining Sussex Publishers, Rose founded Matter For Men magazine, a lifestyle magazine focused on male emotional issues. Before that he spent eight years at Conde Nast Publications working on Vanity Fair and GQ magazines.
Rose is a South African citizen, born in Cape Town in 1960. He matriculated from Diocesan College and graduated from the University of Cape Town with a Bachelor of Business Science: Marketing degree. After college he was conscripted into the South African Army where he became an Officer in the Inspector General unit. After completing his service he immigrated to the United States where he has lived for the last 20 years.
He lives in Manhattan with a wife and two children, aged 7 and 5 years. |
|
|
|
Books by Sapolsky at books.google.com
Sapolsky on wikipedia.org
Stress, Neurodegeneration and Individual Differences (video)
|
|
ROBERT SAPOLSKY, PhD
Professor of Biological and Neurological Sciences, Stanford, author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers
Robert Maurice Sapolsky (b. 1957) is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biological Sciences, and Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University.
Robert Sapolsky received his B.A. in biological anthropology summa cum laude from Harvard University and subsequently attended Rockefeller University where he received his Ph.D. in Neuroendocrinology, working in the lab of Bruce McEwen, a world-renowned endocrinologist.
As a boy in New York City, he dreamed of living inside the African dioramas in the Museum of Natural History. By the age of twenty-one, he made it to Africa and joined a troop of baboons. Although the life of a naturalist appealed to him because it was a chance to “get the hell out of Brooklyn,” he never really left people behind.
In fact, he chose to live with the baboons because they are perfect for learning about stress and stress-related diseases in humans. Like their human cousins, baboons live in large, complex social groups and have lots of time, Dr. Sapolsky writes, “to devote to being rotten to each other.” Just like stressed-out people, stressed-out baboons have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and hardened arteries. And just like people, baboons are good material for stories. His gift for storytelling led The New York Times to suggest, “If you crossed Jane Goodall with a borscht-belt comedian, she might have written a book like A Primate’s Memoir,” Dr. Sapolsky’s account of his early years as a field biologist.
The uniqueness of Sapolsky’s perspective on the human condition comes from the ease with which he combines his insights from the field with his findings as a neuroscientist. For more than twenty-five years, Sapolsky has divided his time between field work with baboons and highly technical neurological research in the laboratory. As a result, he can effortlessly move from a discussion of pecking orders in primate societies (human and baboon) to an explanation of how neurotransmitters work during stress—and get laughs doing it.
The problem for people, as Dr. Sapolsky explains in his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, is that our bodies’ stress response evolved to help us get out of short-term physical emergencies—if a lion is chasing you, you run. But such reactions, he points out, compromise long-term physical health in favor of immediate self-preservation. Unfortunately, when confronted with purely psychological stressors, such as troubleshooting the fax machine, modern humans turn on the same stress response. “If you turn it on for too long,” notes Sapolsky, “you get sick.” Sapolsky regards this sobering news with characteristic good humor, finding hope in “our own capacity to prevent some of these problems…in the small steps with which we live our everyday lives.”
The humor and humanity he brings to sometimes-sobering subject matter make Dr. Sapolsky a fascinating speaker. He lectures widely on topics as diverse as stress and stress-related diseases, baboons, the biology of our individuality, the biology of religious belief, the biology of memory, schizophrenia, depression, aggression, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Sapolsky is a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, and a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museum of Kenya. In addition to A Primate’s Memoir, which won the 2001 Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in nonfiction, Robert Sapolsky has written three other books, including The Trouble with Testosterone, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and Monkeyluv and Other Essays on our Lives as Animals. His articles have appeared in publications such as Discover and The New Yorker.
He is the author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases and Coping (1994), which explores the effects of prolonged stress and its contribution to damaging physical and mental afflictions. His other books include, The Trouble of Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997), Junk Food Monkeys (1997), A Primate’s Memoir (2002) and Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (2005). |
|
|
|
Liberation Prison Project website |
|
ANDRE SMITH
Teacher in prisons, youth mentor
I was born May 16, 1951 in the segregated south, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Most of my childhood and adolescence I lived in fear, self-doubt and anger. I dropped out of High School and joined the Army and was very soon sent to Vietnam. While there, in 1970-71, I became addicted to heroin, cocaine, opium and speed. I left Vietnam with a General Discharge (not honorable). Having come very close to losing my life from overdosing I began to want to break free from my addictive and dangerous life-style. I began to take a closer look at my life and the choices that I made and began searching for my purpose in life.
I went back to school. I was awarded Associate’s Degree of the Arts at Wake Technical Community College, graduating with honors; and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Psychology from North Carolina State University, graduating cum laude.
Now, as an educator myself, I teach GED (General Education) classes at Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, NC. I am also Project Coordinator for the Minority Male Mentoring Program at the school. This demographic of students, primarily young, African American males, raised in single-parent households, require a great deal of attention. Overwhelmingly, they lack the social and academic skills that would allow them to be successful in life. They lack self-esteem and find it virtually impossible to see any hope of a bright, promising future for themselves. I became a Buddhist in 2002; in 2004 I joined the team of Liberation Prison Project, based in San Francisco, teaching meditation and anger management classes at Caledonia Maximum Security Prison and Nash Correctional Institute. |
|
|
|
 |
|
DAVID SOBEL, MD, MPH
Medical Director of Patient Education and Health Promotion for The Permanente Medical Group, Inc. and Kaiser Permanente Northern California
David S. Sobel, MD, MPH is Medical Director of Patient Education and Health Promotion for The Permanente Medical Group, Inc. and Kaiser Permanente Northern California which serves over 3 million members. He practices adult primary care medicine at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Offices in San Jose.
Dr. Sobel completed a Bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of Michigan. He then received his medical training at the University of California San Francisco with a medical internship at Presbyterian Hospital-Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. He also completed a Masters degree in Public Health and a residency program in General Preventive Medicine at the School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley.
His research and teaching interests include medical self-care, patient education, preventive medicine, behavioral medicine and psychosocial factors in health. He is coauthor of seven books including: Living a Healthy Life with Chronic Conditions, The Healing Brain, Healthy Pleasures and Mind & Body Health Handbook (also published under the title The Healthy Mind, Healthy Body Handbook).
Dr. Sobel’s more than 200 television appearances to educate the public about health issues include the Today Show, CNN, Hour Magazine, and a regular television news segment on KNTV, the ABC affiliate station in San Jose. His health education work in television and video has earned him awards from the American Heart Association and the American Film Festival. He also served as an invited delegate to the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) Congress that generated the Ottawa Charter on Health Promotion. He is the 2001 recipient of the national Healthtrac Foundation Health Education Award given to a health educator who has made a substantial contribution to advancing the field of health education or health promotion through research, program development, or program delivery. He is project director for two programs that won the Kaiser Permanente James A Vohs Award for Quality: Chronic Disease Self-Management Program Multi-Region winner in 2002 and The Self-Care/Healthwise Handbook Program runner-up in 1997. He is also a recipient of The Permanente Medical Group, Inc. Exceptional Contribution Award for 2005 for creating, developing and disseminating health education programs that support KP members throughout the continuum of care. |
|
|
|
Stanford Center on Stress and Health website |
|
DAVID SPIEGEL, MD
Professor & Associate Chair, Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Stanford School of Medicine
Dr. David Spiegel is Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine where he has been a member of the academic faculty since 1975 and is Director of the Psychosocial Research Laboratory. He received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Yale and his medical and psychiatric training at Harvard prior to coming to Stanford. He is the author of over 280 research papers, chapters in scientific journals, and books.
Dr. Spiegel is a leader in the field of psychosomatic research, treatment and development with particular interest in the field of psychoneuroendocrinology/oncology.
Since beginning research on the effects of support groups for women with metastatic breast cancer in 1976, Dr. Spiegel has published numerous studies showing that group psychotherapeutic interventions have positive effects on mood disturbance, coping and pain among these patients. He is the author of a landmark study, Effect of psychosocial treatment on survival of patients with metastatic breast cancer (The Lancet; October 14, 1989; 888-891), a randomized prospective clinical trial which studied the effects of psychotherapeutic intervention in women with metastatic breast cancer. This study demonstrated that the application of supportive-expressive group therapy in women with terminal disease not only improved quality of life, but significantly enhanced survival time. This research used a rigorous scientific methodology to address large and important questions regarding the relationship between psychosocial and biological variables in breast cancer and possible mechanisms through which they may be related, and has spawned a new line of research on the health effects of psychosocial support. This work was the subject of a segment on the Bill Moyers' Emmy Award-winning special Healing and the Mind.
His laboratory is currently completing a replication trial to determine whether or not Supportive/Expressive group psychotherapy results in longer survival time in a sample of 125 women with metastatic breast cancer. This trial is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). An independent multi-center replication trial is being conducted in Canada under the direction of Dr. Pamela Goodwin, medical oncologist at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto in a sample 225 women with advanced breast cancer. Dr. Spiegel is also directing trials of the effects of group psychotherapy for women with recently diagnosed breast cancer (a multicenter trial with the Community Clinical Oncology Program, sponsored by NCI) and for men and women with HIV infection (sponsored by NIMH).
His book, Living Beyond Limits: New Hope and Help for Facing Life-Threatening Illness (Ballantine/Fawcett, 1994) is a careful description of his fifteen years of experience in helping patients with advanced cancer cope with their illness. Consistent themes are examined, including the importance of forming strong bonds of mutual support, facing fears of dying and death directly, reordering life priorities, managing relationships with family, friends, and physicians, and learning to control pain and other symptoms with self-hypnosis. The book describes his pioneering study with metastatic breast cancer patients, and provides sensible guidelines for those women living with this illness and their families. Dr. Spiegel has developed a long overlooked area - compassionate supportive care for the medically ill which does not make the error of teaching patients that survival is simply mind over matter. His research has shown, however, that mind matters.
Dr. Spiegel has long had an interest in the use of hypnosis as treatment for medical symptoms and treatment side effects. In 1978, he and his father, Herbert Spiegel, MD , co authored what has become a standard textbook on the clinical uses of hypnosis, Trance and Treatment. The use of self-hypnosis to alter help children undergoing painful and embarrassing procedures such as voiding cystourethrograms is among his current research funded by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In the area of cancer prevention, Dr. Spiegel is currently conducting a large prospective trial of the efficacy of training in self-hypnosis in facilitating smoking cessation. This study will provide information regarding predictors of smoking abstinence and subsequent risk for cancer and other illnesses. He is the past president of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, and in 1986, was the recipient of the Schneck Award for significant contributions to the development of medical hypnosis.
He has studied immediate reactions to life-threatening events, including the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake and the 1991 Oakland/Berkeley firestorm, demonstrating that acute dissociative symptoms are strong predictors of the development of later post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Spiegel collaborated in the inclusion of Acute Stress Disorder, a new psychiatric diagnosis in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) as well as serving on the committee for Dissociative Disorders. He is the editor of Dissociation: Culture, Mind and Body (American Psychiatric Press, 1994).
In 1998, Dr. Spiegel opened the UCSF/Stanford Complementary Medicine Clinic at Stanford Medical Center, and he serves as its Medical Director. This new program is designed to provide the highest standard of clinical care and research to the utilization of techniques designed to help patients better cope with their illnesses. The program includes careful diagnostic assessment and treatment recommendations, a Cancer Supportive Care Program including nutrition, exercise, and support groups, hypnosis, biofeedback, acupuncture, therapeutic massage, mindfulness meditation, and yoga.
In 1997, Dr. Spiegel was the Burroughs Wellcome Visiting Professor, Royal Society of Medicine, United Kingdom, and a Rockefeller Foundation Visiting Scholar at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. In 1995, Dr. Spiegel was the recipient of the Edward A. Strecker, M. D. Award, given annually by the Pennsylvania Hospital and the University of Pennsylvania Health System to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the field of clinical psychiatry in the United States . In 1993 he received the Treya Killam Wilber Award from the Cancer Support Community. He was given the Kaiser Award and the Academic Faculty Member Residency Program Award for Excellence in Teaching at Stanford University School of Medicine in 1986. He is also a Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists and the American Psychiatric Association.
His research is supported by a number of leading research and charitable foundations, including the National Institute of Mental Health, National Cancer Institute, American Cancer Society, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Nathan S. Cummings Foundation, the Fetzer Institute, the Charles A. Dana Foundation, and others. His current research involves collaborative efforts with investigators from Canada, Norway, Israel, Australia as well as a variety of medical-surgical specialists, psychiatrists and psychologists from the US.
Dr. Spiegel's research interests involve stress and health: cognitive control over somatic functions, including cancer progression, the response to traumatic stress, and the perception of pain and anxiety. He is currently conducting a large scale study of the relationships among sleep disturbance, diurnal stress hormone patterns, and breast cancer survival, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. This work is based upon earlier evidence from his laboratory that loss of circadian variation in cortisol, indicative of HPA dysfunction, predicts early mortality with breast cancer.
Dr. Spiegel is also continuing study of the relationship between the acute response to trauma, including dissociative symptoms, and the development of post-traumatic stress disorder. He is also evaluating various methods of treating these symptoms. Dr. Spiegel is carrying out studies of the neurophysiological components of hypnosis by studying brain correlates of hypnotic perceptual alteration, using PET, fMRI and diffusion tensor imaging. His research program is designed to examine neurophysiological and peripheral mechanisms through which psychological and social support may influence physical health. |
|
|
|
San Francisco Sinfonietta |
|
URS STEINER LEONHEARDT
Founder, Executive Director and Conductor of San Francisco Sinfonietta
Internationally renowned as a conductor, guitarist, educator, and composer, Maestro Steiner founded the San Francisco Sinfonietta as a 501(c)(3) not for profit organization in 1994. Originally from Chur, Switzerland, he graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Master of Music in 1986. He studied conducting with James Wimer, Gustav Meier, Herbert von Karajan as well as Master classes with Andre Previn, Erich Leinsdorf and Leonhard Bernstein. In collaboration with his father, techno star Peter "Cool Man" Steiner, he has received critical acclaim for CD's that have sold more than a million copies worldwide.
Maestro Steiner's compositions include operas "Il Secondo Settenio" and "Return of the Phantoms" which have been performed to critical acclaim in Switzerland and the United States. In addition to leading the San Francisco Sinfonietta in local and international endeavors, he is a frequent guest conductor with orchestras and ensembles in Europe, United States and Central America. He is currently Music Director of the International Music Festival and Co-Director of "Musica en Los Barrios" in Managua, Nicaragua as well as artistic Director of the Music Theater Chur, Switzerland. Under his direction he has created innovative music education partnerships with the "Pan y Arte" Foundation in Muenster, Germany for funding community programs for underprivileged youth and communities in Central America. Here in San Francisco he is the Music Director of the Community Music Center Orchestra as well as the Adda Clevenger School Show Choir. Mr. Steiner is the first Swiss Artist to appear at the White House in Washington D.C.
|
|
|
|
Meng's website
Google.com |
|
CHADE-MENG TAN
Google’s Jolly Good Fellow
Chade-Meng Tan (Meng) is Google's Jolly Good Fellow (which nobody can deny). His unusual job title started as a joke, but eventually became real. Meng was one of Google's earliest engineers. Among many other things, he helped build Google's first mobile search service, and headed the team that evaluated and kept a vigilant eye on Google's search quality. After a successful 8-year stint in Engineering, he now serves with Google University, where he works to promote both Google culture and personal growth. His main project is Search Inside Yourself - a Mindfulness-based Emotional Intelligence course, which he hopes will eventually contribute to world peace in a meaningful way.
Meng earned his MS in Computer Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He went to Santa Barbara mainly for the beach, but didn't mind the graduate degree either. He has won many computing-related awards, including the Championship of Singapore's National Software Competition. Prior to coming to the United States, Meng had a successful engineering career in Singapore. (He knew it was successful because nobody offered to fire him).
Meng created one of the world's earliest websites on Buddhism in 1995. He considers himself a Buddhist "on most weekdays, especially Mondays". He is an avid meditator, because meditation facilitates in him inner peace and happiness "without doing real work". Meng occasionally found himself featured on the New York Times and other newspapers. His personal motto is, "Life is too important to be taken seriously".
Meng hopes to see every workplace in the world become a drinking fountain for happiness and enlightenment. When Meng grows up, he wants to save the world, and have lots of fun and laughter doing it. He feels if something is not a laughing matter, it's probably not worth doing.
|
|
|
|
Project Happiness website
Dalai Lama Foundation website |
|
RANDY TARAN
Founder and Director of Project Happiness
Randy Taran, Founder and President of Spring Communications, is a social entrepreneur committed to producing media to affect social change. Recent projects include The Peace Wall, and the short film series Focused on Peace in collaboration with the Dalai Lama Foundation and Jane Goodall's Roots and Shoots.
Currently, through her non-profit 501(c)3, called Project Happiness, Randy is stewarding a global initiative which integrates the message of the Project Happiness documentary film with an educational curriculum inspired by young people for young people around the world.
The film follows High School students from California, Nigeria and India joined together on a coming-of-age journey to understand lasting happiness. Along the way, they engage in conversations with George Lucas, Richard Gere, neuroscientist Richard Davidson, and ultimately the XIVth Dalai Lama.
The Project Happiness Handbook, uses a project-based learning approach featuring seven levels: Happiness, Obstacles to Happiness, Self-Reflection, Myself - My World, Self-Mastery, Compassion, and Interdependence. As students progress through the seven levels they discover strengths, insights and skills to empower them on their lifelong journey.
Randy received her MBA from New York University in Marketing and International Business. Her passion is impacting youth through innovative education and the media to help create positive change.
|
|
|
|
AlanWallace.org website |
|
B. ALAN WALLACE, PhD
President of the Santa Barbara Institute of Consciousness Studies, author of Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness and Genuine Happiness: Meditation as a Path to Fulfillment
Born in Pasadena, California in 1950, Alan Wallace was raised and educated in the United States, Scotland, and Switzerland. In 1968, he enrolled in the University of California at San Diego, where for two years he prepared for a career in ecology, with a secondary interest in philosophy and religion. However, during his third year of undergraduate studies at the University of Göttingen in West Germany, his interests shifted more towards philosophy and religion; and he began to study Tibetan Buddhism and the Tibetan language.
In 1971, he discontinued his formal Western education to go to Dharamsala, India, where he studied Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, and language for four years. During his first year in Dharamsala, he lived in the home of the Dr. Yeshi Dhonden, personal physician of H. H. the Dalai Lama. Throughout his stay in Dharamsala, he frequently served as interpreter for Dr. Dhonden, and under his guidance he completed a translation of a classic Tibetan medical text. In 1973, he began training in the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, in which all instruction, study, and debate were conducted in Tibetan.
In 1975, at the request of the Dalai Lama, he joined the eminent Tibetan Buddhist scholar Geshe Rabten, in Switzerland, first at the Tibet Institute in Rikon, and later at the Center for Higher Tibetan Studies in Mt. Pèlerin. Over the next four years, he continued his own studies and monastic training, translated Tibetan texts, interpreted for Geshe Rabten and many other Tibetan Lamas, including the Dalai Lama, and taught Buddhist philosophy and meditation in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, France, and England.
At the end of 1979, he left Switzerland to begin a four-year series of contemplative retreats, first in India, under the guidance of the Dalai Lama, and later in Sri Lanka and the United States.
In 1984, after a thirteen-year absence from Western academia, he enrolled at Amherst College to complete his undergraduate education. There he studied physics, Sanskrit, and the philosophical foundations of modern physics, and in 1987 he graduated summa cum laude and phi beta kappa. His honors thesis was subsequently published in two volumes: Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind (Snow Lion: 1996) and Transcendent Wisdom: A Commentary on the Ninth Chapter of Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life (Snow Lion, 1988).
Following his sojourn at Amherst, he spent nine months in contemplative retreat in the high desert of California. Then in 1988, he joined the Tibetan contemplative Gen Lamrimpa to assist in leading a one-year group contemplative retreat near Castle Rock, Washington, during which ways were explored for refining and stabilizing the attention.
In the autumn of 1989, he entered the graduate program in religious studies at Stanford University, where he pursued research in the interface between Buddhism and Western science and philosophy. These studies are closely related to his role as an interpreter and organizer for the "Mind and Life" conferences with the Dalai Lama and Western scientists beginning in 1987 and continuing to the present. In 1992, sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute, which he helped to found, he traveled widely in Tibet, conducting a preliminary survey of living Buddhist contemplatives. In 1995, he completed his doctoral dissertation on attentional training in Tibetan Buddhism and its relation to modern psychological and philosophical theories of attention and consciousness. A modified version of his dissertation has been published under the title The Bridge of Quiescence: Experiencing Tibetan Buddhist Meditation (Open Court Press, 1998).
During the period 1992-1997, he served as the principal interpreter for the Venerable Gyatrul Rinpoche, a senior Lama of the Nyingma Order of Tibetan Buddhism. During this time, he translated five classic Tibetan treatises on contemplative methods for exploring the nature of consciousness. From 1995-1997, he was a Visiting Scholar in the departments of religious studies and psychology at Stanford University. During this time, he and his wife, Dr. Vesna A. Wallace, produced a new translation from the Sanskrit and Tibetan of the classic text A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life (Snow Lion, 1997), and he also conducted research for his primary academic work thus far, The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness.
From 1997-2001, Alan Wallace taught in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he held classes on Tibetan Buddhist studies and the interface between science and religion. His most recent academic books are The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground (Columbia University Press, 2003), and his latest popular book is Buddhism with an Attitude: The Tibetan Seven-Point Mind-Training (Snow Lion 2001). After leaving UCSB in June 2001, he spent six months in a solitary contemplative retreat in the high desert of California. He now lives in Santa Barbara, where he is the president and founder of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, and he teaches Buddhist philosophy and meditation throughout Europe and North America.
|
|
|
|
Linda White's journey
Journey of Hope website |
|
LINDA WHITE, PhD
Adjunct professor in the Psychology and Philosophy Department at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas
Linda White’s 26-year old daughter Cathy was abducted, raped, and murdered in 1986. Following this devastating loss, Linda returned to college to study grief and loss in order to be able to educate others and counsel those with similar losses. She is adjunct professor in the Psychology and Philosophy Department at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.
Research in the area of death and dying has led her into other academic areas, primarily violence and its prevention, and finally into restorative justice.
She currently works in several areas of restorative justice, including victim-offender mediated dialogues. Linda is a Board Member Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation.
Linda values, above all, responses to violence that are themselves non-violent, and therefore opposes the death penalty for any crimes.
|
|
|
|
Ami White's journey
Journey of Hope website |
|
AMI WHITE
President of the Texas chapter of Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation
Ami recalled hearing that her mother was killed when she was five, and the pain and despair that she has felt then and in the years since. "Those on death row and those who are executed have families, too," she said. "They experience the same pain and devastation that I felt. The most premeditated murder of all is the death penalty." The death penalty only creates more victims. Ami White is now the president of the Texas Chapter of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation.
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
