Speakers

Sara W. Lazar, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Psychiatry Department at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The focus of her research is to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of yoga and meditation, both in clinical settings and in healthy individuals. She has been practicing yoga and mindfulness meditation since 1994. 

Her research has been covered by numerous news outlets including The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, and WebMD. 

Joseph E. LeDoux, PhD is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at New York University. He directs the Emotional Brain Institute at NYU. His many honors include the Fyssen International Prize in Cognitive Science, the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award and the William James Award from the Association for Psychological Science. In 2013, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. His books include The Emotional Brain (Simon and Schuster, 1996), Synaptic Self (Viking, 2002), Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (Viking, 2015), The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains (Viking, 2019), and The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human (Harvard University Press (2023).

LeDoux is also the lead singer and songwriter for The Amygdaloids, a rock band known for their ‘heavy mental” sound—songs about mind and brain and mental disorders.

Zoran Josipovic, PhD is a research associate and adjunct faculty for cognitive and affective neuroscience in the Department of Psychology, New York University. He is the founder and principal science investigator at Nonduality Institute. 

His research interests are unitary states of consciousness cultivated through contemplative practice, what these states can tell us about the nature of consciousness and its relation to authentic subjectivity, and what relevance this may have for understanding the global and local organization in the brain. 

Barry H. Cohen is a research affiliate in the New York University (NYU) Steinhardt school, and, along with Joshua Aronson, he directs the Mindful Education Lab. Recently, he retired as a clinical associate professor, and had been director of NYU's GSAS M.A. program in psychology for more than a decade. He has taught statistics and research design at the graduate level for more than 25 years, and is the author of three statistics text books currently in print. He received a B.S. in physics from Stony Brook University, an M.A. in general psychology from Queens College, and a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from NYU. He completed two years of post-doctoral research under the guidance of Richard Davidson at Purchase College in New York. 

His current research is focused in two main areas: the subjective and neural correlates of inner speech; and the cognitive, affective, and physiological changes produced by the regular practice of meditation and related mental exercises. 

Michael Ferguson, PhD, is a Harvard neuroscientist. He is pioneering the emerging field of neurospirituality: the study of human spirituality using applied methods from neuroscience. Dr. Ferguson is one of the few Harvard faculty members who has held simultaneous appointments at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School. 

He directs the Neurospirituality Lab at the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He also directs First-Year Student Wellness Programming at Harvard College.

Julio Rodriguez-Larios is a lecturer in Psychology at Brunel University (London). His research focuses on the relationship between neural oscillations (commonly referred as ‘brain waves’) and human cognition. For that purpose, he uses Electroencephalography (EEG) and (more recently) non-invasive neuromodulation techniques. 

During his PhD (KU Leuven), he investigated how neural oscillations in the theta-alpha frequency range are modulated in different cognitive states such as effortful cognition, mind wandering and meditation. After that, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University (New York) where he developed analytical techniques to better characterize neural oscillations in EEG. 

Emma Huels, Ph.D., obtained her B.S. in Psychology from the University of Missouri-Saint Louis in 2016. Following graduation, Emma worked at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis examining brain activity in patients with postoperative delirium or those undergoing electroconvulsive therapy for treatment-resistant depression. Emma subsequently completed her doctoral training in Neuroscience at the University of Michigan in 2024. Here, she studied the role of the prefrontal cortex in arousal in rodents, as well as the effects of anesthetics, psychedelics, and shamanic practice on brain dynamics in rats and humans. Her research has been published in leading journals in the fields of anesthesiology and neuroscience. 

Emma is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan with a MICHR postdoctoral award to study the effects of psychedelics on chronic pain in rodents. 

Dr. Ramesh Rao has been a faculty member at UC San Diego since 1984 and Director of the Qualcomm Institute since 2001. He holds the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technologies and is a distinguished professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Rao is involved with a wide variety of research initiatives, leading several major interdisciplinary and collaborative projects at the local, state and federal level. He serves on numerous boards, including the UCSD Health System Advisory Board, Rady Children's Hospital and Health CenterIT Task Force, the Academy of Neurosciences for Architecture, and the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California. 

He is also the President of the San Diego Indian American Society. Dr. Rao earned his Electrical Engineering Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1984 and his M.S. there in 1982; he earned his Bachelor’s in 1980 from the University of Madras.

Yihan (Sophy) Xiong received her B.S. in psychobiology and B.A. in linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles, followed by a postbac research position at Yale University. She started her Ph.D. training at Vanderbilt University, advised by Dr. Andre Bastos in 2021, focusing methodologically on multi-area high-density laminar electrophysiology (MaDeLanE) in non-human primates. 

Her current projects investigate neurophysiological evidence of predictive coding and predictive routing along the cortical hierarchy and predictive processing under loss-of-consciousness.

Mark Reimers is an associate professor in the neuroscience program at Michigan State University, where he integrates statistical analysis with biological theory while analyzing and interpreting the very large data sets now being generated in neuroscience, especially from the high-throughput technologies developed by the BRAIN initiative. 

He graduated from the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia and previously held appointments at Virginia Commonwealth University.