The Team

About the Team

This project brings together a team of experts with a huge range of specialist subjects.

We take a multi-disciplinary approach recognising that the challenges we want to solve involve hard scientific questions as well as questions of anthropology, culture, language, messaging, politics, neuroscience, biochemistry, physiology and more.

We want the project to be cross-cultural and we have people working on it from countries around the world with different religious and spiritual backgrounds.

Some in the EPRC are hard-nosed scientists from different disciplines, others are clinicians using a variety of approaches to improve patient outcomes, others are writers or poets with interests in Emergent phenomena, others are professionals who want to help support the EPRC structure using their expertise, and others are contemplative leaders and teachers, etc. The order generally is chronological based on when they submitted their photo and bio.

We believe that all of these stakeholders can contribute from their roles so that the research resulting from EPRC collaborations is scientifically sound, culturally appropriate, clinically relevant, and socially productive

Those you see here are just some of those in the EPRC. Unfortunately, the taboo topic of our work still compels the majority of EPRC members to hide their membership: may our work help change that.

Dr. Julieta Galante

Dr Julieta Galante, MD PhD is a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge. She is a qualified medical doctor specialized in public mental health research. For over a decade, Julieta has been winning competitive funding to study the potential of meditation techniques for mental health promotion. Her research uses rigorous research methods in real-world scenarios. It has been featured in international media outlets, influenced clinical guidelines, and presented to a wide range of audiences, from international conferences and science festivals to the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

Dr. Kati Devaney

Kathryn (Kati) Devaney, PhD has 20 years of experience researching the mammalian visual system including 15 years of experience conducting brain imaging experiments (fMRI & MRI) on humans and non-human primates at 3T and 7T. Her PhD thesis, supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, examined attention and default network function in experienced Vipassana meditators relative to matched controls. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School conducting a first in human clinical trial of a novel type of noninvasive brain stimulation.

Kati has taught Cognitive Psychology at Boston University and Meditation and the Brain at Stanford. She has given invited lectures at MIT, Harvard Medical School, IIT Delhi, and elsewhere. She has presented her scientific work at international conferences including numerous presentations at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, the Vision Science Society annual meeting, and the Mind and Life International Symposium for Contemplative Research.

Kati is a co-founder and the current President & CEO of the San Francisco Dharma Collective.

Erola Pons

Erola Pons has a Master’s in Neural and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Tübingen (Germany) and is now in a PhD program there starting a research project on the loss of sense of self in meditation and in Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder (DPDR) to try to provide empirical measures to their phenomenology and assess similarities and differences between the two groups. For this, behavioral and brain imaging experiments will be performed, starting with the sense of body ownership and agency and then including other domains as well. She has been a meditator since the age of 16.

Dr. Matthew Sacchet

Dr. Matthew D. Sacchet, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Meditation Research Program at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (Mass General). Dr. Sacchet and his team study advanced meditation: skills, states, and stages of contemplative practice that unfold with mastery and time. Since 2012, he has authored more than 110 publications, presented more than 150 times at international, national, regional and local conferences and speaker series, and been cited more than 7,000 times. He has received generous support from numerous foundations and repeat awards from the primary federal funding bodies in the United States, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF).

His work has been covered by many major media outlets, including CBS, Forbes, NBC, NPR, Scientific American, TIME, Vox, and The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes named him one of its “30 Under 30.” Dr. Sacchet is an Associate Editor of the leading meditation academic journal Mindfulness, and a Research Fellow of the Mind & Life Institute.

Meditation Research Program

Dr. Malcolm Wright

Professor Malcolm Wright is the MSA Charitable Trust Chair in Marketing at Massey University. He has long standing interests in consumer behaviour and currently works on virtual reality shopping, adoption of new therapeutic treatments by physicians, and the role of attention, emotion and associative memory in consumer evaluations. He publishes extensively in leading scientific and business journals, with over 3000 citations to his work. Malcolm has mentored eleven PhD students to successful completions of their theses.

Malcolm is also an experienced manager in both the business and academic worlds, having been responsible for eight figure budgets, scores of staff, and substantial change initiatives over many years. He currently holds positions as the Chair of the Australian Advisory Board for the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia, and is a Fellow of the Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy.

Dr. Martin Huecker, MD

Martin Huecker, MD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville in the Department of Emergency Medicine. He is the EM Research Director. At the School of Medicine, he is the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs. Dr. Huecker is a graduate of the University of Louisville Emergency Medicine Residency Program and was Chief Resident in 2011.

His research interests include the opioid epidemic, accidental hypothermia, and physician and medical student wellness. He works with medical students to instill behaviors to prevent future physician burnout. He distributes a monthly wellness newsletter called The Practice of Wellness. Dr. Huecker loves books and coffee. His wife is an OB/GYN and they have 4 children with cool names.

Dr. Andrea Grabovac

Dr. Andrea Grabovac, MD, FRCPC, is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at University of British Columbia. She teaches residents and medical students in the context of her inpatient psychiatric practice. She is co-director of the North American chapter of the Mindfulness-integrated Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Institute (MiCBT), and trains mental health clinicians in both MiCBT and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy. Andrea’s research interests focus on the phenomenology of the meditative experience in mindfulness-based programs. Andrea is a Vipassana practitioner, and practices and teaches yoga in the Vijnana tradition.

Anna Lutkajtis

Anna Lutkajtis is a PhD candidate from Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on mysticism, the dark night of the soul and the healing potential of altered states of consciousness. She is particularly interested in the relationship between mental illness and spirituality, mystical experiences, and how traditional contemplative and spiritual practices have been integrated into modern Western psychology.

Her Masters thesis, The Dark Side of Dharma, examined why meditation adverse effects, while well known in spiritual and religious traditions, have been ignored in contemporary Western secular contexts. Her PhD project is focused on psilocybin and healing.

She holds a B. Psychology (Hons) degree from The University of New South Wales, a Master of Art Administration degree from the College of Fine Arts, and a Master of Arts (Research: Religion Studies) degree from The University of Sydney.

Dr. Clemens C. C. Bauer

Clemens is an associate research scientist at Northeastern University and research affiliate at the Gabriele Laboratory in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

He is interested in understanding the neural correlates of subjective experience, in particular, the mechanisms underlying the interactions between mind/brain and body. His research is focused in correlating subjective first person experiences with neuronal activation of different networks (i.e. DMN & CEN) in the brain during controlled and sustained attentional periods, especially during meditation.

He is also involved in an RCT with patients with schizophrenia that suffer from auditory hallucinations in order to elucidate whether neurofeedback enhanced mindfulness training significantly improves executive functions, selfcontrol, emotional resilience and wellbeing as well as reducing auditory hallucinations. It has recently shown that indeed, patients can learn how to meditate with the aid of these techniques and effectively reduce their psychopathological symptoms.

Dr. Remko van Lutterveld

Remko van Lutterveld, PhD is an assistant professor at the Brain Research and Innovation Centre of the mental health department of the Dutch Ministry of Defence, and the Department of Psychiatry of the University Medical Center, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Before his current position he worked for 5 years at the Center for Mindfulness of the University of Massachusetts and the Mindfulness Center of Brown University, using EEG, fMRI, and neurofeedback to study neural processes related to meditation. His interests revolve around meditation, mindfulness and mental health. He has been awarded funding from NIH and NARSAD.

Google Scholar Profile

Dr. Jay Sanguinetti

Dr. Jay Sanguinetti is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Arizona and a Research Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico. His training was in philosophy, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, and his dissertation investigated the neural processes of conscious and unconscious visual perception. Dr. Sanguinetti specializes in psychophysiological measures (EEG, fMRI, eye-tracking) of visual perception, emotion, and mindfulness meditation. His team investigates novel forms of brain stimulation, including the use of ultrasound and light-based stimulation to enhance memory, perception, and well-being.

Dr. Sanguinetti is presently investigating whether focused ultrasound neuromodulation can augment mindfulness practice in collaboration with Shinzen Young. They launched the Sonication Enhanced Mindful Awareness (SEMA) lab at the University of Arizona in collaboration with the Center for Consciousness Studies.

Dr. David R. Vago

Dr. David Vago is Research Associate Professor and Director of the Contemplative Neuroscience and Mind-Body (CNMB) Research Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. He is core training faculty for the Vanderbilt Brain Institute and Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology, and Inflammation. He is also a research associate in the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He has completed post-doctoral fellowships in Biological and Social Psychiatry, Neuropsychiatric Neuroimaging, and Mind and Body Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Weill Cornell Medical School, and University of Utah School of Medicine.

Contemplative Neuroscience and Body-Mind Research

Dr. Shamil Chandaria

Dr Shamil Chandaria works in computational neuroscience, philosophy and artificial intelligence. Shamil has a number of positions: he is a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy at the School of Advanced Study, University of London; he is a research fellow at the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London; and he is a special advisor at Google DeepMind working on AI. Shamil is a long-term meditator and is especially interested in the nature of human flourishing and well-being.

Dr. Christopher Timmerman

Christopher Timmermann, PhD obtained a BSc in Psychology in Santiago, Chile and an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Bologna in Italy. He is based at Imperial College London at the Centre for Psychedelic Research, where he led the first neuroimaging research on the effects of the potent psychedelic DMT in the human brain and consciousness, as well as its potential clinical applications. He is also a member of the international interdisciplinary group ALIUS and is the president of the Foundation for the Study of Human Consciousness based in his native Chile.

Dr. Terje Sparby

Dr. Terje Sparby studied philosophy, the history of religion, and the history of ideas, at the University of Oslo. He received his PhD in philosophy at Heidelberg University. He has been a visiting scholar at the Mind & Life Institute, and a postdoc at Humboldt University in Berlin and at the Bender Institute of Neuroimaging (University of Giessen). Currently he is working at the Witten/Herdecke University, focusing on phenomenology, first-person methods, and meditation.

Terje is a long-time meditation practitioner, a trained meditation teacher, and offers retreats. He organizes a biennial conference on first-person methods, blogs about contemplative science , and runs a YouTube channel called Meditations.

Terje’s Website

Dr. Mark D. Miller

Mark Miller Ph.D. is a researcher at the University of Sussex, and lecturer at the University of Hokkaido’s Centre for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience. He is currently working with Andy Clark on the 4-year European Research Grant “Expecting Ourselves: Embodied Prediction and the Construction of Conscious Experience.” Mark’s research focuses on the neuroscience of human happiness and wellbeing, and the impact that current and future technologies have on human flourishing.

Dr. Anna Ciaunica

Dr. Anna Ciaunica is a philosopher and cognitive scientist interested in interdisciplinary approaches to embodied cognition. Her research focuses on the relationship between (a)typical forms of self-consciousness and social interactions.

She is a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Philosophy Porto, the Mind, Language and Action group (MLAG); and a Research Associate at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, the Social Neuroscience Group.

Anna coordinates the international and interdisciplinary Network for Embodied Consciousness and the Arts (NECTArts) aiming at fostering creative collaborations between philosophers, scientists, artists and performers worldwide.

Anna’s Website

Elizabeth J Sabet

Elizabeth Sabet, PCC, ACSLC, CBC is the Founder and lead instructor at the Institute of Transformational and Transpersonal Coaching (ITTC), and the President of the American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences (ACISTE). She works with spiritual experiencers in her private coaching practice and trains peer support group facilitators for ACISTE.

She works to educate people of all ages and backgrounds about the principles of holism in the fields of integrated health, parenting, community relations, team building, and spiritual development.

Elizabeth’s Website

Dr. Brian Spittles, PhD

Brian lives in Perth, Western Australia, and has worked since 2007 as an academic researcher and/or tutor at several Perth universities in the fields of community and sustainable development, Australian Indigenous studies, sociology, multicultural identity politics, intercultural communication, and ecotourism. His research interests are eclectic and multidisciplinary. These include consciousness studies, transpersonal psychology, psychosis, mental health recovery, quantum physics, meditation, Buddhism, shamanism, mysticism, nature studies, and Indigenous knowledge/healing systems. Many of these research foci are incorporated in his book titled Psychosis, Psychiatry and Psychospiritual Considerations (2022). Brian is also an activist in the climate emergency, environmental protection, and social justice arenas.

Marcin Kowrygo

Marcin is a Qualia Research Institute team member with a background in biomedical and cognitive neuroscience. Involved in the rationalist spaces since 2015, he co-founded a nationwide chapter of Effective Altruism, and supported a wide range of EA initiatives. Prior to that, he had been engaged in numerous initiatives at the science-technology-society interface. Marcin prioritizes longtermist cause areas and multidisciplinary valence research involving meditative practices, neurotechnologies, and other modalities.

Dr. Attila Szabo PhD

Attila Szabo is a research fellow at the Norwegian Centre for Mental Disorders Research (NORMENT), Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Oslo (UiO), Norway. He holds two Master’s degrees in Molecular biology/Biochemistry (MSc) and in Philosophy (MA), both from the University of Debrecen, Hungary. He obtained his first PhD in biomedicine with a focus on cellular and molecular immunology, and a second one in modern philosophy concentrating on phenomenology, and the philosophy of consciousness. He did postdoctoral traninings in psychoneuroimmunology and biological psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine, UiO.

His current research interests include brain-immune interactions in health and disease, biological psychiatry, immunopsychiatry, and psychedelic research (phenomenological and biomedical aspects). He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Psychedelic Studies, as well as Associate Editor at Frontiers in Immunology, and at Frontiers in Psychiatry. Besides academia, Dr. Szabo is a founding member of the Norwegian Association for Psychedelic Science (Norsk Forening for Psykedelisk Vitenskap, NFPV), a non-profit organization that aims to educate the general public as well as researchers, and mental health practitioners in Norway about psychedelics.

Google Scholar Profile

Grant Goodwin

Grant Goodwin has a masters in psychological counseling from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, CA, having studied depth psychologists such as Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. He works as an IFCCS therapist in LA.

Grant has a deep experiential understanding of meditative processes related to the unconscious and an interest in the contemporary phenomenological validity and clinical utility of traditional meditative maps and their possible incorporation into the mainstream psychological narrative around diagnosis and treatment planning.

Grant is accepting of potential dissertation ideas on this subject at [email protected].

Dr. Alexander De Foe

Alexander De Foe is a lecturer at the School of Health and Biomedical Sciences at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. His qualifications include a master’s in counselling (Monash University, 2010) and a PhD in experimental psychology (Monash, 2016). Dr De Foe’s doctoral work focused on the phenomenological factors that underpin one’s sense of subjective embodiment and self-ownership. His main interest is in the Cartesian split and how modern theories of perceptual integration inform our understanding of mind-brain dynamism. He has tested his models empirically by exploring out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and body ownership illusions (BOIs). In addition to his research foci, Alex has extensive experience developing coursework in the areas of transpersonal psychology and altered states of consciousness.

Alex’s Website

Bree Greenberg Benjamin

Bree Greenberg Benjamin, LMFT is the founder and owner of the Vermont Center for Integrative Therapy. Over the past two decades Bree has used her training in systems therapy, yoga and contemplative practices to create systems of care that actualize deeper potential in individuals and families through a multidisciplinary team-based approach that she developed. She has spoken at conferences relating to addiction and somatics, written extensively on the topics of eating disorders and liberation (awakening) and was the featured expert in the documentary film, ALL OF ME by Kingdom County Productions. Bree bridges systems of understating and is an innovator of new ways of thinking, attending to the higher needs of the care world. Her new venture is Next Level Collective Care which brings together her history of experience at VTCIT and a new plan for a collective care model that can be applied to solve some of the systemic issues the current mental health system is facing and failing.

Jessica Corneille

Jessica Corneille, MSc is a UK-based research psychologist and PI and co-lead of the Expert Opinion Project (Emergence Benefactors), a novel study aimed at improving global clinical care around Emergent Phenomena, Experiences and Effects (EPEEs). Her dominant area of interest and expertise lies in Spontaneous ‘Awakening’ Experiences (also known as ‘Enlightenment’, ‘non-dual’ or ‘Cosmic Consciousness’ experiences), their therapeutic effects, and areas of convergence, divergence and overlap with psychopathology in order to de-stigmatise, de-pathologise, raise awareness and better inform clinical practice around such and similar experiences.

Jessica obtained her Master’s Degree in Psychology with Distinction from the University of Greenwich, where she focused her studies on “Exceptional Human Experiences” (Transpersonal and Anomalistic Psychology), and commences her PhD in Neurophenomenology at the University of Cambridge’s Consciousness and Cognition Lab in October, where she will continue to observe powerful Altered States of Consciousness such as those elicited by certain forms of contemplative practice. She has presented her work at a number of academic conferences, including with the British Psychological Society, has published academic and popular articles and book chapters on Emergent Phenomena, and is currently partaking in a docuseries on EPEEs. She is an advisor to the Galileo Commission, and collaborator of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium and Spiritual Crisis Network.

Beyond her academic career, Jessica is dedicated to helping individuals both integrate their Spiritually Transformative Experiences through the facilitation of sharing circles and peer-support groups in London and online, and is deeply interested in helping individuals come to the realisation of their highest human potential as a Kundalini Yoga teacher and contracted leadership and empowerment coach.

Dr. Prasanta Pal

Dr. Prasanta Pal is currently an Investigator in Epidemiology at Brown University with a focus on signal processing, advanced noise reduction algorithms, neuroimaging, mobile applications, and related technologies. He trained in Applied Physicist and Large Scale Computer Simulationist at IIT Kharagpur, India and has a PhD from Yale University. He is deeply interested in applying principles of physics, computer simulation, algorithm, big data and systems modeling to real world problems like medical imaging, neuro-feedback technology, and digital health. He has worked on interventions like Craving to Quit that serves thousands of people across the globe to help take control of addiction and behavioral change using mindfulness and mobile app tools.

Jake Elijah Payne

Jake is a Master of Clinical Psychology and PhD student at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. His PhD research involves the development and trial of a psilocybin-assisted mindfulness training protocol to improve wellbeing in mental health practitioners. His ambition is to understand how contemplative and meditative traditions can support functional integration following psychedelics on an individual and societal level in the Australian landscape.

Dr. Ausiàs Cebolla i Martí

Ausiàs Cebolla i Martí is a professor of psychology from the Universitat de València (Spain) and member of the research group Labpsitec. He is a researcher in the area of contemplative practices (both in terms of effectiveness in interventions and research on mechanisms), the use of virtual reality to enhance the meditation practice, and the dialogue between positive psychology and contemplative sciences. He is co-designer of a contemplative practice-based contemplative program (EBC) and involved in a project to use embodied-virtual reality to facilitate compassionate states and increase adherence. Ausiàs is also interested in the design and development of a pictographic scale to measure meditative experiences. He has collaborated in multiple scientific publications in high impact journals and has participated in national and international conferences.

Tim Wood

Tim is a social scientist trained in business management, with experience in organizational development, higher education, and conflict resolution. He has an MBA in Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise from Colorado State University and is excited to generate and apply knowledge regarding the connections between the subjective and objective aspects of reality. His past work focused on training and coaching probation officers in Motivational Interviewing to elicit their clients’ internal motivation for behavior change. He recently collaborated on a study and forthcoming publication about unusual and intense contemplative experiences called “Mindfulness Teacher Trainee’s Experiences,” an online study through Cambridge University. Tim looks forward to future opportunities to explore how our inner and outer worlds connect, and to apply that knowledge in service to others.

Tim Hwang

Tim Hwang, OTR/L, CMT-P is a trained and licensed occupational therapist and meditation teacher with a focus on mental health. He is a therapist in the NYC Department of Education where he serves high school students with disabilities, has experience in various healthcare settings, and serves as a private coach to individuals for meditation and mindfulness.

Tim’s professional work includes leading, implementing, and spreading awareness of contemplative practices to educational institutions. He is interested in best practices for trauma sensitivity and knowledge into emergent phenomena in these systems in order to assist with the safety of spiritual and psychological growth.

Tim’s Website

Dr. Aviva Berkovich-Ohana

Dr. Aviva Berkovich-Ohana is a professor of neuroscience, affiliated at the University of Haifa, Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center, and Faculty of Education (Departments of Counseling and Human Development, as well as Learning, Instruction and Teacher Education).

Her research focuses on the effects of altered states induced by contemplative trainings (e.g. meditation, sensory deprivation, psychedelics) on consciousness, cognition and self-reference, as well as the possible applications to the fields of education and psychotherapy. She is interested in the neural and cognitive processes underlying the sense of self(lessness), as well as its phenomenology, and frequently uses neurophenomenology to uncover the underlying mechanisms of subtle experiences (such as the sense of self boundary).

She is passionate about the Consciousness State Space (CSS), a conceptualization of consciousness. The CSS framework is a neurophenomenological dynamic 3D model for consciousness and selfhood which relates time, awareness, and emotion within one field, thus creates a comprehensive theoretical framework with explanatory and unificatory power, and allows modeling post-conventional human psychological growth, as well as evaluating its value for psychotherapy and education. She has been practicing different meditations since 1995, and teaches mindfulness meditation both at University courses, and retreats outside the University (Or Halev).

Aviva’s Website

Dr. Marie Grace Brook

Marie Grace Brook is a spiritual director and researcher in spiritual psychology. She received her PhD from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Her dissertation research involved a world-wide survey of 441 people who have been through spiritual emergencies that took months to years to integrate. As part of the study, Marie Grace created the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences Inventory (ISTEI). The research was published in 2019 in the American Psychological Association journal, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. The research was groundbreaking in showing statistically significant agreement among people who integrated life-changing spiritually transformative experience in what helps to integrate them, even when the types of experiences varied across several events such as NDEs, kundalini awakenings, conversion experiences, ADCs, and other mystical experiences. The study also showed statistically significant evidence that involvement with psychiatrists and psychiatric meditations were not helpful and often detrimental in the challenge of integrating them. Presently, Dr. Brook is completing a book based upon qualitative data obtained from the research project. She carries on a private practice, runs a modest retreat house with her husband in Santa Cruz, CA, USA, and pursues research in cross-cultural spiritual emergence and hands-on-healing.

Marie Grace’s Website

Jules Evans

Jules Evans is a practical philosopher and historian of ideas. He is an honorary fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. He’s the author of Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations (2012), The Art of Losing Control (2017) and the co-editor of Breaking Open: Finding a Way Through Spiritual Emergency (2021).

Philosophy For Life

Dr. Michael Garbe

Dr. Michael Garbe is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who specializes in incorporating spirituality into therapy. He has experience working in the field of trauma and with compulsive and codependent behaviors. He currently practices privately and teaches clinical social work practice at a university level. His doctoral research focused on how clinicians assess and work with individuals who have gone through a spiritually transformative experience (STE). These experiences are often triggered by trauma and can be traumatic as well if not properly supported. He hopes to increase spiritual competence within the helping professions, through continued research, teaching, and public speaking.

Michael has presented his research at national conferences, including the American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences (ACISTE) and the Society for Spirituality in Social Work. He is also the author of “Spiritual Emergency,” a chapter in the social work textbook: Spirituality in Mental Health Practice: Phenomenological Perspectives.

Dr. Niffe Hermansson

Dr. Niffe Hermansson has a degree in Engineering Physics focusing on Theoretical Physics and Mathematical Statistics from Lund University and a PhD in Applied Probability from the University of Auckland where he currently works as a Professional Teaching Fellow.

While Niffe’s research has lately mainly focused on Operations Research, in particular Queueing Theory, he has a deep interest in applying his understanding to the process of spiritual development. In particular he is interested in leveraging his understanding of complex and counterintuitive behaviours of even fairly simple processes to understanding how emergent experiences develop within an individual as well as propagates through populations.

Caroline Fernandes

Caroline Fernandes is a holistic licensed professional psychotherapist with over 20 years of experience in spiritually transformative and paranormal experiences, including 15 years as a core energy healer and transpersonal intuitive coach. She has given lectures at several universities in India and the USA on integration of spirituality and energy healing for trauma survivors. She has presented her case studies at numerous international and regional conferences including American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences (ACISTE, USA), the International Conference on Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (ICPRS, India), and American Counseling Association.

Caroline is a part-time faculty, doctoral candidate, research assistant at Mercer University, USA. Her doctoral research studies included quantitative study on translation of Adlerian BASIS-A psychometrics (English-Hindi), developed openness to healing psychometrics, neurocounseling, mindfulness and wellbeing, advance field interviewer documenting refugees’ experiences, and effects of childhood sexual trauma on spirituality and intrapersonal relationships. Her dissertation focus is on prevention of misdiagnosing spiritually transformative experiences as pathology in mental health. Caroline is a published chapter author in Spirituality & Psyche and other scholarly counseling related articles. She is the founder of Holistic Zindagi, cross-cultural podcast, practicing meditator, yogini, and spiritual medium. At her private practice she teaches Reiki, meditation, and mindfulness courses.

InnerVision Holistic Counseling

Roger Thisdell

From a young age, Roger had a very low hedonic set point but over the years, through introspective and meditative practices, he has managed to tremendously increase his baseline well-being to a level much above the norm. He now has a mind which represents itself as permanently centreless and without the sense of a singly, positioned epistemic agent. He aims to help others achieve similar levels of baseline well-being and mental unperturbability by providing guidance with his online meditation group meditative.dev. Roger is also interested in working with others to detail the specifics of phenomenal content in order to better understand consciousness and valence and ultimately reduce sentient suffering. He is currently undertaking a master’s at The University of Edinburgh (Scotland) in Epistemology, Ethics and Mind with Cognitive Science.

Dr. Mike Daw

Mike Daw is a doctoral researcher at the University of Northampton, United Kingdom. His research focuses on the potential relationship between spiritual and psychic experiences, and dietary practices, especially fasting and vegetarianism.

Points of particular interest include the development of an ‘optimal psychic nutrition’ to support those wishing to develop psychic abilities and to assess whether there is any validity to claims that meat is grounding for those undergoing a spiritual emergency.

This work builds on the importance of food (or its absence) within a number of spiritual traditions, including shamans who use fasting (among other practices) to support abilities such as weather-control and energy healing, and yogis in India, many of whom are strict vegetarians and sometimes claim to be able to perform telepathy or ‘mind over matter’. Several authors writing about spirituality and psychic abilities also stress the importance of fasting and vegetarianism, such as the polymath Rudolf Steiner, the physician Gabriel Cousens, and the psychical researcher Hereward Carrington.

Mike’s professional background is in university management and software engineering. He holds a BA(Hons) in Social Science and an MSc in Computation.

Mike Rush

Mike Rush is a co-Director of the UK Spiritual Crisis Network (SCN), a Trustee of the Alister Hardy Trust (AHT), and a committee member of the Transpersonal Section of the British Psychological Society (BPS). The SCN provides information and peer-support for people affected by spiritual crisis/emergency, and the AHT supports the work of the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC), which is based at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Mike trained as a hypno-psychotherapist with the National College of Hypnosis and Psychotherapy, and is registered with the CNHC. He is also an accredited Spiritual Emergence Coach with the IMHU.

By day, Mike works as an ICT Service Desk Manager, which provides a joint ICT service supporting three District Councils. By night, he is currently pursuing a PhD in the Applied Psychology department of Canterbury Christ Church University, supported by the Professional Development Foundation and the Alef Trust. He is undertaking research into empirically supported interventions for spiritual crisis.

Mike’s Website

Liam McClintock

Liam McClintock is the founder of FitMind, a meditation app and podcast. He is currently living as a Buddhist monk and completing an MS in neuroscience at King’s College London. Previously, Liam received a BA from Yale and worked in private equity. He has trained in various meditation styles around the world, including an RYT 500 in Nepal. His book The Mind Revolution (Penguin, 2023) seeks to bring the neuroscience of meditation to a broad audience.

Sam Tullman, MPH, BCN

Sam Tullman, MPH, BCN is a researcher and consultant in the study of emergent practices, with primary focuses in EEG and behavior change. He received his MPH in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the University of Washington, and is currently on a Fulbright Scholarship in Northeastern Brazil at UFRN’s Instituto do Cérebro, studying the neurophysiological, behavioral, and phenomenological impacts of inhalation of N,N-DMT as part of a Phase I clinical trial for the substance. He consults primarily in the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) space, architecting the EEG training strategy for FIELD Neuroscience Solutions, and aiding in developing “state” classifiers and training strategies for Atai Life Sciences’ Psyber Health. His overarching interest in both consulting and research is allowing transformative practices and experiences to be more accessible to the general population, which brings together his work in Health Communications, Psychedelic Neuroscience, and BCI.

Sam is also a dedicated student of Rinzai Zen, but draws heavily in his practice from other Buddhist traditions, as well as modern Western psychology and Neuroscience.

Dr. Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square

Dr. Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square is an Assistant Professor of Literature, the Environment, and Climate Change at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada. She received her DPhil/PhD from the University of Oxford (UK) in 2017, after which she worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Manitoba (2018-2019), as an English and Interdisciplinary Instructor in the Faculty of Arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (2019-2021), and as an Assistant Professor (LTA) in the Department of English at Bishop’s University (2022-2024). During this time, she was also a Research Affiliate with the UM Institute for the Humanities (2018-2019; 2021-2022).

Bryn has had literary articles published on topics such as imagination, empathy, mental health, emotional contagion, feminism, environmental justice, and social change. Her most recent publication, a chapter she co-authored with Dr. Carol-Ann Farkas for the Routledge Handbook of Health and Media, “Climate Health Is Human Health: Working Through Eco-Anxiety with the Written Word in Print and Digital Media,” was published in August 2022.

Her latest project, “Books, Brains, and Benevolence: An Interdisciplinary Study of Empathy,” explores the links between fiction, imagination, mental and physical health, and compassion and advocates for a radical shift from a self-focused to an other-focused society and for a renewed awareness of how intimately connected we are to one another and to our environment.

Dr. Colin A. Ross, MD

Dr. Ross completed medical school at the University of Alberta and his psychiatry training at the University of Manitoba in Canada. He is a Past President of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation and the author of over 250 papers and 36 books. He has spoken widely throughout North America and Europe as well as in China, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand. He has been a keynote speaker at many different conferences and has reviewed for over 30 different professional journals. Dr. Ross has been running a hospital Trauma Program in the Dallas area since moving to Texas in 1991. The Trauma Program is based at UBH hospital in Denton, TX. He has Partial Hospitalization Programs in Cedar Park and Lubbock, Texas.

Dr. Ross’ books cover a wide range of topics and include Human Energy Fields: A New Science and Medicine (2009). Dr. Ross has published a series of papers on human energy fields and measuring them with non-contact electrodes, including one in an electrical engineering journal. He holds US patent 7,806,527 for an Electromagnetic Beam Detection System. Besides his clinical psychiatry interests, Dr. Ross has published papers on cancer as well as literary works including essays, fiction, poetry, and screenplays.

Taylor Hansen

Taylor Hansen has a master’s degree in research psychology from Purdue University Global and has plans to pursue a Ph.D. in the near future. Her research focus is on using psychedelic-assisted therapy to treat mental illness, and her master’s thesis focused specifically on psilocybin and depression. She is also the ambassador for Students for Sensible Drug Policy in McHenry, IL. Her two passions in this field are research and education and she hopes to use both to help people around the world get the treatment they need and change the stigmas around psychedelic substances.

Jon Lieberman

Jon Lieberman is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioural Neuroscience at McMaster University in Ontario. Jon’s research focuses on the use of real-time neurofeedback as a therapeutic intervention to regulate aberrant neural networks present in various psychiatric disorders. He is particularly interested in studying the efficacy of mindfulness meditation techniques in conjunction with neurofeedback in psychiatric populations. Jon’s long-term interest resides in the further development and scaling of neurotechnology to promote optimal brain states for patients with psychiatric disorders, as well as the general population.

Dr. Emma Bragdon

Dr. Bragdon, transpersonal psychologist, has been a pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence/emergency since 1984. In 2013 she founded Integrative Mental Health University (IMHU), a non-profit organization offering mostly online courses/presentations to the public and healthcare providers on the integrative paradigm of care (body, mind, spirit, community). These courses emphasize the positive potential of spiritual experiences in optimizing wellbeing.

In 1985 Emma hosted 2 invited conferences sponsored by Esalen Institute on defining and managing spiritual emergence/y. Her book “A Sourcebook for Helping People in Spiritual Emergency” (1988) (in 2006 re-titled “A Sourcebook for Helping People with Spiritual Problems”) was the first book published in English on the topic. Harper San Francisco invited her to publish “The Call of Spiritual Emergency” in 1990. Emma was licensed as a transpersonal psychotherapist in 1988 and added teaching internationally to private practice shortly thereafter. From 2001-2012 she spent 6 months of each year in Brazil—learning about and participating in Spiritist therapies, and she went on to write 5 more books and co-produce two documentary films.

In her role as the appointed ‘ambassador’ of a Spiritist Psychiatric Hospital, Emma also holds an annual 7-day seminar on location in Brazil in which she and her Brazilian colleagues introduce healthcare providers to the practices of Spiritist Community Centers and Psychiatric Hospitals in Brazil. Emma is very interested in putting practical shoes on theories/research surrounding spiritual emergence(y), thus her dedicated interest in Spiritism and involvement with the Self-Realization Fellowship. She’s been a meditator since 1964. She lives in a small town in central Vermont, USA.

Dr. Katrina Michelle

Katrina Michelle, PhD, LCSW is a holistic psychotherapist and spiritual integration coach who earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology at Sofia University and her Master’s in Social Work from Stony Brook University. For her doctoral research she conducted a heuristic study on Exploring Resistance to Spiritual Emergence. Her Master’s research focussed on spiritual development within higher education.

Katrina worked as the director of harm reduction for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) at the Zendo Project and served for three years as the executive director of The American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences (ACISTE). Katrina has served as graduate faculty at Columbia University School of Social Work, Fordham University School of Social Services, and The Institute for the Development of Human Arts. She is currently teaching at NYU’s Department of Applied Psychology and designing research with the EPRC to elucidate the phenomenology of challenging psychedelic states and support the creation and practical application of integration techniques.

Informed by her academic research and her own transcendent experiences, Katrina supports people in exploring, embracing, and integrating the multifaceted human experience. She has worked with assisting those returning from non-ordinary states of consciousness from psychedelic journeys, kundalini awakenings, near-death experiences, and similar transpersonal states using an intuitive, relational, and somatically reflective approaches based on her years of clinical experience, trainings in hypnotherapy, yoga, energy psychology, eco-therapy, and personal growth work.

As co-founder of Emergent Entertainment, a company on a mission to demystify awakening experiences through storytelling and art, Katrina is also working on producing her first film, When Lightning Strikes, to help create a cultural context for these experiences.

Dr. Anna Yusim

Dr. Anna Yusim is an award-winning, Stanford- and Yale-educated, Board Certified Psychiatrist and Executive Coach. On the Clinical Faculty at Yale Medical School, Dr. Yusim is the best-selling author of Fulfilled: How the Science of Spirituality Can Help You Live a Happier, More Meaningful Life. Having helped over 1500 patients live happier, more meaningful lives, Dr. Yusim is presently starting a Spirituality and Mental Health Center at Yale and making a feature-length documentary on the interface of mental health and spirituality.

Dr. Yusim has published over 150 academic articles, book chapters, scientific abstracts, book reviews and articles for the lay public on various topics in psychiatry. A frequent contributor to CNN, Fox News, ABC and NBC, she has been a guest on countless national and international TV shows, radio programs and podcasts. As a highly sought-after speaker, Dr. Yusim gives keynotes for physicians and professionals all over the country and the world on topics related to thriving post-COVID, preventing burnout, improving mental health in the workplace, physicians as meaning-makers, and resilience. For her physicians and executive clients, she conducts workshops to empower individuals to sharpen their intuition, enhance their capacity for empathy, and improve their ability to connect with others. She also offers workshops for the general public on cultivating authenticity and awakening self-compassion.

Anna’s Website

Yair Lavi

Yair lavi is a trans-personal and body-related psychotherapist. His research focuses on the phenomenon of sleep paralysis which started as an independent researcher and these days his research focus on the relationship between sleep paralysis, spirituality, and mindfulness at the University of Haifa (Israel). He sees the research of sleep paralysis as a life project and is passionate to understand and explore the uncharted territory of this phenomenon. Through his Facebook group, he is aware of the gap between the vast call from help from people that are going through sleep paralysis, while on the other hand the indifference of the medical and the health care systems. He is hoping to raise the interest and the knowledge of sleep paralysis between those experts and collaborates with other researchers on that topic or parallel ones like lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences (OBEs).

Dr. Gus Castellanos

Gus Castellanos, M.D. is a graduate of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He practiced Neurology and Sleep Medicine for 25 years. He has been practicing mindfulness since 1998 and teaching and researching mindfulness-based programs since 2009. He is certified to teach Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) by the University of Massachusetts Center For Mindfulness & trained with and participated in mindfulness research with Amishi Jha at the University of Miami. He has facilitated hundreds of mindfulness programs to thousands of participants throughout South Florida and teaches mindfulness virtually via Zoom, primarily with Mindful Leader. He is an adjunct instructor at Nova Southeastern University, where he developed, delivered, and researched a mindfulness-based program for their students, staff, and faculty. Gus has facilitated a twice-monthly mindfulness session at a local prison since 2011, lectures widely, and writes a twice-monthly Mindfulness newsletter. He serves on Palm Health Foundation’s Better Brain Health Advisory Board.

Rabbi Aaron D. Cherniak

Rabbi Aaron D. Cherniak is a clinical and research psychologist completing his PhD at Stockholm University. He is the Director of JPSYCH Lab of Judaism and Mental Health and an ordained rabbi.

His research examines spirituality – in intense experiences and everyday life – and its association with mental health/flourishing in the context of lifespan development. In particular, he is interested in how the relational dynamics described by attachment theory may a) underlie affect-laden religious/spiritual beliefs, behaviors, and experience, and b) constitute causal mechanisms linking religion/spirituality to personality, interpersonal relationships, and mental health. Building off his past work on therapeutic exploration, he studies how people integrate their spiritual experiences into their lives. His dissertation research, the Jewish Psychedelic Narratives Project, explores Jews’ experiences with psychedelics and integration, seeking to provide evidence-based, culturally competent insights to promote spiritual growth and flourishing.

He is an avid canoeist and lover of wordplay.

Chinmayee Hiremath

Chinmayee is a meditation practitioner and lifelong inquirer into the nature of subjective experiences. Her professional background spans various disciplines, converging around effective education and emotional well-being. She has designed and run numerous experiential education and metacognitive skill-building programs using alternative pedagogies such as eco-psychology and adventure-based therapy that place subjective experiences central to personal growth/ well-being. She has been involved with the Effective Altruism movement since 2016, and has a deep loyalty to suffering-focused ethics. At present, her inspirations lie at the intersection of subjective experiences, good science, and opportunities for suffering reduction.

Wystan Bryant-Scott

Wystan is a Teacher of Shinzen Young’s Unified Mindfulness system concurrently studying cognitive science and philosophy at the University of Toronto. He trained intensively for 2 years as a resident in monasteries of the lineages of Thích Nhất Hạnh, Ajahn Chah, and Taizan Maezumi as a lay-person and anagārika. In between and following monastic stints he’s enjoyed exploring and engaging various classical contemplative traditions all the while integrating a secular life within continuous emergent practice. He intends to realize, research, and make available the benefits of emergent practice for all, with specific interests in the neurophenomenology of emergent states and traits of subject-object non-duality, absorbed concentration, and visionary experience, as well as their ethical and societal implications. He teaches meditation 1-1 by donation and hosts a podcast discussing these and other topics.

Wystan’s Website

Teodora Vuković

Teodora Vuković currently works as a researcher in the CAPIRE and VIAN-DH projects at the University of Zürich, Switzerland, developing tools and methodology for quantitative analysis of multi-modal interaction. CAPIRE focuses on extracting idiosyncratic patterns from human communicative signals, namely speech, facial expressions and gestures using speech processing and computer vision. VIAN-DH is research software for multimodal data collections that also provides intuitive graphical interface for using state-of-the-art tools for automatic speech, image recognition, and natural language processing. By enabling the simultaneous analysis of various forms of bodily or verbal behaviour across large amounts of data, Teodora’s work strives to contribute to a more complete analysis of human behaviour.

Teodora contributes her skills to the EPRC’s Big Data project where she analyses meditator’s reports in search of patterns indicative of meditative progress. She also volunteers for both the EPRC and Emergence Benefactors.

Teodora is an enthusiastic meditator with a strong community spirit. She is a part of the meditative.dev meditation collective.

Emmanuel Juma

Emmanuel Juma is a video editor with Ashy Productions and a Philosophy student in the third year of his degree at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia, Canada. He is interested in consciousness studies and in finding ways to address systemic racism. He is also one of the video editors for the Brains & Banter Podcast and for the associated interdisciplinary global forum “Redesigning Our World,” June 3 to 5, 2022.

Emmanuel’s current research interests are in Existentialism and language, which have led him unexpectedly to video editing because he wanted to find a medium through which these difficult concepts could be magnified and understood to a greater extent. By creating videos, he is able to accomplish this because he combines these disparate tools for storytelling (sound, colour, movement, etc.) and thereby increases the message’s reach and comprehension tenfold. In the future, Emmanuel plans to establish a channel for artists and intellectuals to reach the general public.

@AshyProduction

David Field

David Field is a motion picture director and producer and founder of Caterpillar Media LLC, a full-service production company based in New York, NY and Atlanta, GA. He is currently producing a documentary on transcendence, exploring frontiers of consciousness and the nature of reality through legitimate science and philosophy. He seeks to interview specialists in the study of mind, brain, cosmos, quantum mechanics, and artificial intelligence.

Dr. Jordan M. Blacktop

Dr. Blacktop’s career work includes academic neuroscience (Ph.D.) studying, researching, mentoring, and teaching how the brain works with drugs, how the drugs change the brain, and how the changes of the brain control behavior. Dr. Blacktop has a successful intramural and extramural grant funding record, and numerous seminal peer-reviewed publications involving drug-induced neuroplasticity and relapse. Dr. Blacktop has engaged in the investigation, mentorship, and teaching of a broad scientific palate of systems and cellular biology applications, from the individual neuron to operant behavior, toward understanding wholeness. Dr. Blacktop’s area of expertise includes the integration of biology, neuroscience, psychology, physiology, anatomy, and different coaching modalities to assist others in finding their path into wholeness. He is the founder of Solscience which is rooted in an integrated approach toward emergent practices & phenomena by utilizing coaching, education, and science.

Dr. Marjorie Woollacott, PhD

Dr. Woollacott is Professor Emeritus and past chair of the Dept. of Human Physiology, and a member of the Institute of Neuroscience, at the University of Oregon. She has a broad background in neuroscience related to cognition, neural control of movement and neurological rehabilitation. She has received extensive research funding from the National Institutes of Health and other research agencies for the past 35 years for her research in child development, aging, rehabilitation medicine and most recently, in meditation.

Her areas of expertise include: 1) changes in attentional performance skills and underlying neural networks associated with the mental training of meditation and tai chi; 2) the development of balance and attentional abilities in normal children and in children with motor problems such as cerebral palsy and Down Syndrome; 3) factors leading to loss of balance and movement function in the older adult, and in patients with motor disorders such as stroke and Parkinson’s disease, in order to improve the quality of life and independence of adults well into old age; 4) the design of new assessment and treatment strategies to improve balance and attentional abilities. These include testing the efficacy of alternative forms of therapy such as tai chi and meditation for improving both attention and balance and gait abilities in patient populations; 5) her current research explores the physiological and transformational effects of mystical experiences, including near-death experiences, meditation, and after-death communication experiences.

In all, she has published more than 200 scientific articles and written or co-edited eight books. She is the co-author, with Dr. Anne Shumway-Cook of the textbook for health care professionals, titled: Motor Control: Translating Research into Clinical Practice, which is in its 6th edition (2021) as well as editor of the books Is Consciousness Primary? (2020), Expanding Science (2020), and Spiritual Awakenings: Scientists and Academics describe Their Experiences (2022, AAPS press). In addition to teaching courses on neuroscience and rehabilitation, she has taught courses on complementary and alternative medicine and meditation. She is currently the president of the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences (AAPS), the co-Director, with David Lorimer, of the Galileo Commission, and the Research Director of the International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS).

Sebastian Ehmann

Sebastian possesses an interdisciplinary background in nutrition, exercise science, and psychology and is currently in the process of applying to Clinical Science Ph.D. programs. His research interests revolve around investigating both implicit and explicit changes in self-processing, achieved through the integration of transcranial neuromodulatory interventions, psychedelics, and mindfulness. The overarching goal is to connect this research with existing evidence indicating that aberrant self-processing serves as a transdiagnostic mechanism of psychopathology, with the ultimate aim of applying these innovative treatment methods across various disorders. To realize this objective, Sebastian plans to employ a multimethod approach, combining clinical, behavioral, phenomenal, and multimodal neuroimaging techniques.

In his pursuit of comprehending and leveraging the entire spectrum of self-processing, Sebastian actively engages in the study of advanced meditators. Within this realm, his specific focus lies on perceptual changes, such as non-dual awareness, and their correlation with affective and reward processes. In the field of psychedelic research, Sebastian is captivated by the enduring impact of altered states of consciousness on self-processes and the correlation between self-transcendent emergent phenomena and associated health benefits. Within this context, he seeks to understand the mediating role of epistemological and metaphysical transformations. Through the integration of philosophical, neuroscientific, and psychological frameworks, Sebastian aims to construct a comprehensive scaffolding that enhances the positive outcomes of these experiences.

David Lorimer

David Lorimer, MA, PGCE, FRSA is a writer, lecturer, poet and editor. He is a Founder of Character Education Scotland, Programme Director of the Scientific and Medical Network and former President of Wrekin Trust and the Swedenborg Society. He has also been editor of Paradigm Explorer since 1986 and completed his 100^th issue in 2019. He was the instigator of the Beyond the Brain conference series in 1995 and has coordinated the Mystics and Scientists conferences every year since the late 1980s.

Originally a merchant banker then a teacher of philosophy and modern languages at Winchester College, he is the author and editor of over a dozen books, including Survival? Death as Transition (1984, 2017), Resonant Mind (originally Whole in One) (1990/2017), The Spirit of Science (1998), Thinking Beyond the Brain (2001), The Protein Crunch (with Jason Drew), and A New Renaissance (edited with Oliver Robinson). He has edited three books about the Bulgarian sage Beinsa Douno (Peter Deunov): Prophet for our Times (1991, 2015), The Circle of Sacred Dance, and Gems of Love, which is a translation of his prayers and formulas into English. His book on the ideas and work of the Prince of Wales – Radical Prince (2003) – has been translated into Dutch, Spanish and French. His new book of essays, A Quest for Wisdom was published in 2021.

David is also Chair of the Galileo Commission which seeks the expand the evidence base of the science of consciousness beyond a materialistic world view.

In 2020 he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award as a Visionary Leader by the Visioneers International Network and the 2021 Aboca Human Ecology Prize. He is a Creative Member of the Club of Budapest.

David’s Website

Ana Cassia Rocha Martins

Ana Martins is an Ashtanga yoga instructor as well as a full-time psychology student in her final year of her bachelor’s at Vrije University in Amsterdam. Born and raised in Brazil within a Spiritist family, witnessing emergent phenomena was a weekly part of her early life before she even knew there was a term for it. After many years of living in the UK with a solid career in marketing, she made the decision to study psychology after a long journey into self-knowledge which developed into a deep passion. Ana is particularly interested in psychedelic research and how mind-altering substances can help people heal and live better lives.

Olivier Sandilands

Olivier Sandilands holds a multidisciplinary Master of Research (M.Res.) from the School for Higher Studies in the Human Sciences (EHESS, Paris), where he wrote a thesis comparing the phenomenologies of aesthetic and contemplative experiences. His PhD research was at the crossroads of phenomenology, philosophy, psychology and religious studies ; it explored the phenomenology of advanced meditative states and realization. Olivier is also an expert meditator and has received training in both the micro phenomenological interview and analysis methods. Upon ending his academic commitments in 2021, Olivier was recruited by Emergence Benefactors, the 501(c)3 non-profit designed to support the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium‘s mission of “Reducing global suffering and promoting long-term human flourishing through an in-depth understanding of emergent phenomena.” He is in charge of developing and coordinating the Phenomenology, Theoretical Foundations and State of the Art EPRC Projects.

This empowering and synergistic setting has allowed his work to acquire more depth and dimensionality, leading to a considerably richer epistemological and thematic scope, and to a general axiological reorientation favoring concrete therapeutic and pragmatic applications. In particular, his work now centers on the study of all possible types of emergent phenomena, practices and effects in all contexts, rather than just the experiences and transformations born from specific meditative practices, and involves more complex and thorough philosophical and epistemological construction, on top of relying on a considerably larger and multidisciplinary corpus of traditional and contemporary literature on emergent development, both theoretical and experiential.

Claude Berghmans, PhD

Claude Berghmans is a French research psychologist (PhD), associated with the psychology laboratory of the University of Lorraine (Lab interpsy, clinical and pathological psychology). It works on the following topics:

-Evaluation and effectiveness of therapeutic alternatives: (meditation, shamanic practices, distance healing therapies, energy healing, spiritual approaches)

– Alternative and complementary medicine: epistemological, clinical and therapeutic aspects, – effectiveness of practices

-Impact of spirituality and religion on mental health: therapeutic and clinical axis

-Clinic of exceptional experiences: modified states of consciousness (NDE, OBE, trance): adaptive aspects and effects on personality

– Clinical ecopsychology

Claude was also a Director of Human Resources for 20 years in Luxembourg. He now devotes himself to research.

Saampras Ganesan

Saampras is currently undertaking his PhD with the Biomedical Engineering department at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research is focused on developing and improving brain-based technological solutions to support meditation practice and make it accessible to more people. He has been successful in securing an academic seed funding grant from the Contemplative Studies Centre, Australia to support expenses pertaining to his PhD project. Saampras has a background in biomedical engineering, robotics engineering and neuroimaging, along with a natural inclination towards psychological mindedness. He has experience with functional MRI computational analyses (3T and 7T), functional MRI data acquisition, brain-machine interfaces and robotics.

Broadly, Saampras aims to understand how meditation can be made more accessible for beginners and psychiatric patients using technology such as bio/neurofeedback. Additionally, he is also interested in how meditation translates to daily life, and what robust scientific tools can be used to capture daily life impact.

Dr. Bernard “Bernie” Beitman

Bernard Beitman, M.D., is the first psychiatrist since Carl Jung to systematize the study of coincidences. A graduate of Yale Medical School, he did his psychiatric residency at Stanford University. The former chair of psychiatry of the University of Missouri-Columbia medical school for 17 years, he writes a blog for Psychology Today on coincidence and is the coauthor of the award-winning book Learning Psychotherapy. The founder of The Coincidence Project, he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Kaio Shimanski

Kaio Shimanski is a meditation instructor and founder of the Brazilian school Centro Pineal, a Yoga, Meditation and Technologies school. He is a pioneer in the study and application of technology to consciousness in Brazil. In his personal pedagogical method, he aims to create do-it-yourself solutions so that lay people can have access to the most diverse technological devices such as mixed reality, electroencephalogram, drones, flotation tanks, video games and much more, and thus be able to create communication bridges between ancient wisdom and the modern world.

Dr. J. Kim Penberthy

Jennifer “Kim” Penberthy, Ph.D., ABPP is the Chester F. Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, where she conducts research, teaches, and provides clinical care. She is a Board Certified licensed clinical psychologist who has been practicing for over 20 years. Dr. Penberthy provides clinical treatment to patients in Psychiatry and the University of Virginia Cancer Center and also works with health care workers at UVA and nationally. She is the Associate Director of the Clinician Wellness Program and is a Fellow of Humanism in Medicine at the University of Virginia. She is President of the American Psychological Association’s Society of Clinical Psychology. She is on the advisory committee for the American Psychological Association Continuing Education Committee and a fellow in the APA Leadership Institute for Women in Psychology. Dr. Penberthy’s research involves discovering the mechanisms of action of therapeutic and contemplative practices on human wellbeing, experiences, and performance. She also studies altered states of consciousness and the methods and impact of such, including meditation, psychedelic medicines, spontaneous experiences. She has published extensively and lectures internationally about wellness, resilience, extraordinary experiences, and psychotherapy. She has presented her work and research for the World Bank, the United Nations, the American Psychological Association, multiple national and regional health systems and physician groups as well as at international confernences. She has scores of publications in professional journals, books, and book chapters. Her most recent book is “Living Mindfully Across the Lifespan: An Intergenerational Guide,” which was co-authored with her daughter, Morgan.

Dr. Helena Daly

Dr Helena Daly is a dream specialist and practitioner, independent educator and freelance writer and lecturer. She has a private dream practice, offering dream consultations and therapeutic dream work, and gives educational workshops for public, private and professional interest. Helena previously trained and worked as a nurse in London, before gaining her BA in Cognitive Psychology, Masters in Counseling Psychology and PhD with a focus in dreams. Her doctoral work was a hermeneutic-phenomenological exploration of the dream-waking state of consciousness (hypnopompic state) and non-ordinary experiences that manifest there.

Besides holding a deep interest in all things dream-related, especially dreams of a healing nature and psychic phenomena, Helena is also interested in end-of-life experiences that occur during the dying process (transpersonal dreams, visions and waking encounters), and recently worked as a spiritual and psychological care practitioner in hospice and palliative care in Ireland. Over the last few years, she has presented her work at multi-disciplinary conferences internationally (in-person and virtually) and writes for different audiences (academic, professional and public) on dreams and related topics, especially in relation to healing and health. Other interests include developing more balanced approaches to consciousness and first-person methods of inquiry rooted in disciplined practice. Helena is currently writing her book “Between Here and There: Subtle Life in Dreams, Dying, Death” and is delighted to be back living in San Francisco, her home away from home.

Dr. Mona Sobhani

Mona Sobhani, Ph.D., is a cognitive neuroscientist, author, and entrepreneur. A former research scientist at the University of Southern California, she holds a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Southern California and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University with the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project. She was also a scholar with the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy, and Ethics. She is the author of Proof of Spiritual Phenomena: A Neuroscientist’s Discovery of the Ineffable Mysteries of the Universe (Park City Press/Inner Traditions), which details her transformation from a diehard scientific materialist to an open-minded spiritual seeker. In the Brave New World of Psychedelic Science substack, she writes about the psychedelic renaissance, altered states of consciousness, and the transpersonal. She is co-founder of Exploring Consciousness, a community of curious scientists who are seeking to understand consciousness, spirituality, and the nature of our reality.

Jonathan Cerna

Jonathan is a doctoral student in Neuroscience. He received his B.S. in Dietetics from Iowa State University, and his M.S. in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research interests, broadly speaking, focus on the relationship and effects of modifiable lifestyle behaviors, with an emphasis on non-traditional modes of physical and mental training, such as yoga and mindfulness meditation.

Jonathan aims to integrate seemingly disparate disciplines of study with the goal of exploring their rich interactions (additive, synergistic, etc.) and help provide a more holistic framework for physical and mental well-being. He is interested in integrating multiple scales of analysis and observation (mechanistic to translational) to answer novel health-related questions.

His current project focuses on corroborating the concept of bidirectional communication in mind-body practitioners, its implications for proficiency in the cognitive domain, and its likely relationship with stress-regulation and thus, greater psychophysiological well-being. This is being derived from a bigger project aiming to use multimodal wearable devices to detect and predict anxiety in conjunction with various machine-learning techniques.

Dr. Tracy Brandmeyer

Dr. Tracy Brandmeyer is an American neuroscientist and Chief Science Officer at BrainMind where she coordinates and oversees scientific operations and research ventures of the organization. Her scientific career has focused on the development of innovative scientific methods to study and promote human flourishing. Over the last two decades, her research has explored the neural and physiological mechanisms underlying attention and emotion regulation, as well as the development of novel neurophenomenological methods for studying meditation, neurofeedback, and altered states of consciousness. She is also a research consultant at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, serves as a scientific advisor to Lionheart Ventures, and advises several early-stage startups in the neuro and biotechnology sector.

Tracy completed a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the CNRS in France, and a MSc in Neuropsychology at the Donders Institute, in the Netherlands. Throughout her doctoral studies, she conducted her field research in monastic settings in the northern Indian Himalayas, where she led an international collaboration studying the electrophysiological correlates of mental states arising from a variety of contemplative traditions. After completing her Ph.D., she was awarded a three-year NIH research grant at UCSF to identify the translational features of her research for clinical, neurotechnological, and biomedical applications for mental health and wellness monitoring. She joined the BrainMind team as CSO in the Spring of 2021.

Crystal Harrell

Crystal Harrell is a #1 Best-Selling author, motivational speaker, and certified Academic Success Coach. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Public Health at Yale University and serves part-time as a 1st Lieutenant in the US Army. Through her books and growing education blog, Crystal’s story has impacted thousands of individuals worldwide and created a push for personal growth in academia.

Over the course of her academic journey, Crystal received over $670,000 in scholarship awards, including the prestigious Bill and Melinda Gates Millennium Scholarship and the Yale School of Public Health Dean’s Research Award. She shares details of her journey to help other non-traditional students get ahead in her first #1 Best-Selling book Crystal Clear: A Journey of Self-Discovery (From Public Housing to Ivy League).

Crystal is an Executive Contributor to Brainz Magazine, which reaches readers from over 65 countries and is read by more than 300,000 people weekly. She has graced the TEDx stage and appeared on several podcasts, radio shows, and webinars as a content expert on goal achievement, resiliency, and leadership.

Crystal’s ultimate goal is to raise awareness of our human potential and show that it is possible to rise against all odds and live out your wildest dreams.

Crystal’s Website

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Niels Lyngsø

Niels Lyngsø is a Danish poet, writer and translator (English, French, German, Swedish and Norwegian) with an MA in Comparative Literature from Copenhagen University. Niels is especially interested in the phenomenology of meditative experiences and wrote a little book describing his first 10 day Goenka-retreat in detail. It is called Ti dages stilhed (“Ten Days of Silence,” not out in English-yet? but in Italian and Norwegian translations). He has a new and much more voluminous book on its way (in Danish) on meditation, consciousness and the progress of insight, using detailed phenomenology from his own quite intense meditative journey. Niels is into pragmatic dharma, vipassana, intense retreats, and the combination of psychotherapy (primarily Internal Family Systems) and meditation. He has been guiding people in meditation informally since 2020 and is per the summer of 2023 a budding official meditation teacher (guiding in Danish and English). Niels has an intensive meditation practice with roughly one thousand hours on the cushion per year.

Julianne Serpa

Julianne holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology with a specialization in Clinical Mental Health. She has dedicated her career in service to people with disabilities and has worked with a wide range of populations including those with mental illness, children with autism, and disabled veterans. She was instrumental in leading projects that helped support veterans and athletes with disabilities across the United States to explore yoga and meditation as a complement to their sport training.

Julianne was first introduced to yoga in 2000 and completed her 200-hour yoga teacher training in the tantra hatha yoga tradition with the Pranakriya School of Yoga Healing Arts in 2024. She is an aspiring yoga therapist, budding poet, and founder of Sapper Spirit. She plans to launch the Sapper Spirit Foundation in the future to break down barriers to accessing genuine, in-person teachers — spreading the Light of yoga and human connection to All Beings, Everywhere.

A former atheist transformed by profound and sometimes bewildering experiences with emergent phenomena, she is inspired to support the work of the EPRC to help others who may be like her obtain proper support and avoid harm that can be inadvertently caused by contemporary healthcare systems. Julianne is passionate about educating experiencers, their loved ones, and healthcare providers about emergent phenomena so they may make better informed choices about how to support integration of these experiences and skillfully engage in contemplative practices.

Dr. Siri K. Zemel

Dr. Siri K. Zemel is a healthcare business consultant, currently serving in the substance use disorder, eating disorder, and integrative medicine fields. Her core competencies include business strategy, organizational change, culture development, and operations guidance. She received her doctorate in Mind Body Medicine with a Healthcare Systems concentration from Saybrook University.

Dr. Zemel is a volunteer research associate with the Institute of Noetic Sciences where she currently co-leads research studies involving mediumship and channeling, including the professionalization, ethical standards development, and certification evaluation of mediums/channelers. She is a life-long spiritual channeler and author of Guided: Journey into the Unknown to Awaken the Soul and Live in Truth (2021).

Dr. Mila Kaplan

Dr. Mila Kaplan received her PhD in Economics from Clemson University, South Carolina, worked for UN’s UNECE and WIPO in Geneva, and for the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE-JETRO) in Tokyo. Her academic and consulting work applied quantitative and qualitative empirical techniques to assess the impact of innovation and intellectual property rights on economic development. Mila has regularly presented at international conferences, consulted governments across the developing world, and her work has been published in various economics journals.

Since first encountering meditation in 2015 through S.N. Goenka’s Vipassana retreat, she has experienced it as a profoundly transformative journey, absorbing and applying ideas from Buddhism to her life and meditation practice. She currently lives in London with her husband and two young children, and is exploring opportunities to merge her experience applying rigorous research methods with her deep-rooted interest in meditation and emergent phenomena.

Dr. Katja Milner

Dr. Katja Milner completed Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Doctoral research at the Institute of Mental Health and School of Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham, U.K. Her thesis explores the role of spirituality in mental health and recovery from the perspectives of lived experiences. It aims to help bridge what has been highlighted as a spirituality gap in understanding the importance of people’s spiritual experiences and needs, which are often neglected within clinical practice. It does this through a qualitative systematic review and the production of an evidence-based conceptual framework (MISTIC Framework). In addition, an in-depth narrative analysis of the ways in which people describe meaning making, psychospiritual development and spiritual connection in their stories of spirituality, mental health and recovery.

Katja has worked across an extensive range of mental health settings for 15 years prior to engaging in her PhD research. Most recently she was involved in developing a pioneering new role as a spiritual care practitioner and then spirituality lead in an NHS mental healthcare trust. Katja has completed Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy training, a PG Cert in Psychological Therapies, and an MSc in Mental Health Recovery. Katja is interested in developing teaching, training and educational approaches towards spirituality, mental health, recovery and wellbeing, as well as furthering research and evidence. She is interested in collaborations with others.

Noah Clark

Noah Clark is a professional software engineer and meditator with a bachelors in Computer Science. While a rigid materialist, Noah began to encounter emergent phenomena spontaneously in early 2017, which fundamentally transformed his worldview. Noah spent years navigating and integrating the various challenges that can result from the ontological shake up resulting from these emergent experiences. Through this process, Noah explored many psychedelic, meditation, and psychotherapeutic modalities including Unified Mindfulness, Goenka Vipassana, Mahasi style noting, Internal Family Systems, Self Inquiry, Direct Pointing, Shipibo ayahuasca ceremonies, and many more.

All of this led to a deep passion and interest into how subjective experience can be observed and measured, and how software and modeling can be used to further our collective knowledge of consciousness. To that end, Noah has been involved in three major efforts, 1st; the development of a methodology and software platform that allows the measurement of arbitrary dimensions of subjective experience in real-time, 2nd; a standardized, version-controlled, computable ontology based in graph theory for the purposes of collecting and measuring subjective experience in combination with survey and bio-signal data, and lastly 3rd; a research platform that combines the previous two interests so that experiments in this method can be conducted in the fields of phenomenology, meditation, and psychedelic research.

Please contact Noah if you are a researcher or software developer who would like to collaborate.

Mariam Saleh, Esq.

Mariam J. Saleh is an attorney and Reiki Master based in southern Oregon. In 2019, she inadvertently began a journey of spiritual emergence via a meditation practice designed to simply lower stress. Mariam’s journey on the contemplative path was a pivotal experience that informed her current life’s work. Her litigation career could not continue as she found herself contending with the Dark Night stage of the path along with difficult Kundalini experiences and the blossoming of extrasensory abilities.

She is the founder of Sound in Color, a new productions company designed for storytelling about both difficult and beautiful experiences along the contemplative path.

Mariam’s current legal research and advocacy work is centered on the intersection of Spiritual Emergency, ethics, and law. She currently serves as acting General Counsel for Emergence Benefactors, the nonprofit organization developed to primarily support the researchers of the EPRC.

Julie Chan

Julie has over 15 years of experience in health and well-being, technology, innovation, and social impact. She worked in urban planning and economic development in New York City for ten years, developing and implementing multi-million dollar initiatives in healthcare technology, biotech, small business support, and social impact. After a spontaneous spiritual awakening experience when she was a graduate student at MIT, she became aware of intuitive abilities and has been on a mission to transform our current approaches to healthcare, education, business, and human potential.

Julie Chan is the founder of Being My Purpose, a social enterprise that empowers entrepreneurs and executives to discover and express their life purpose with courage and creativity. For nine years, she has channeled thousands of pages of information from the Akashic Records for her clients, providing soul-aligned strategies and coaching for them to impact their lives and communities. She was invited to serve on the Advisory Committee of the Yale COPE Project at Yale’s School of Medicine, which studies the psychic perceptual experience to broaden our understanding of mental health.

She envisions a world where people feel safe and encouraged to share their emergent experiences and a medical and mental health system that understands the full spectrum of the human, lived experience.

Julie holds a B.A. from Yale University in Economics and American Studies and a Master’s degree in urban planning from MIT. She enjoys singing, photography, painting, and exploring the mid-Hudson Valley area of New York.

If you are interested in purpose, spirituality, community-centered real estate, and other topics, please feel free to reach out to Julie!

Beata Grobenski

Beata is an active member of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium and the Qualia Research Institute, holding two MAs in literature and information and communication sciences, as well as a year of psychotherapy education that motivated her to embark on independent research. Her interests include healing trauma with neural annealing, qualia formalism, the music theory of consciousness, and emergent phenomenology, with an emphasis on understanding involuntary or spontaneous awakenings and integrating these insights into mainstream clinical practice. This integration is a key aspect of the EPRC’s Expert Opinion Project, in which she is currently involved.

Since the summer of 2023, she has been writing “The Good Annealing Manual: From Psychedelic Alchemy to the Chemistry of the Mind,” a book scheduled for publication by the QRI by the end of 2024. This guidebook aims to enhance emotional well-being, provide grounding for challenging phenomenology, offer instructions for sustaining peak experiences, detail stress dissipation techniques, and ultimately present a comprehensive theory of QRI’s neural annealing.

Originally from Croatia, Beata currently resides in Leipzig, Germany.

Ryan Kay

Ryan is a self-taught software engineer, science nerd, and meditation practitioner since 2013. From a young age, Ryan wanted to understand everything around him, such as why water boiled when heated or why it was possible to look through glass and see one’s reflection at the same time.

Ryan had an aversive, overly-analytical, and emotionally stifled mind during his early years. Leaving home at age 17, he immediately began searching for answers about the nature of reality and suffering in books, audio recordings, YouTube videos, and anywhere else he could find them. In 2013, he came across some teachings from Ajahn Jayasaro (Thai Forest Tradition Buddhism) and has since learned from many different traditions and teachers; even those outside of Buddhism.

Ryan began learning Android app development in 2014 and eventually started to teach it on youtube. He has taught programming to millions of students via video lectures, technical articles, conference talks, and live Q&A sessions on youtube.

To pay the bills, Ryan currently works as a professional mobile engineer on client codebases.

Dr. Jeffrey Overall

Dr. Jeffrey Overall (BComm (Hons), MBA, Ph.D) is a professor of conscious economics and entrepreneurship. He bridges the important topics of economics and consciousness-expansion for more sustainable business outcomes. His expertise is on: mental health, optimum performance, consciousness expansion, spiritual awakening, sustainability, and entrepreneurial and organizational success and failure. He has been investigating the role of mental health in the workplace for over a dozen years. He has consulted on various research projects including: the Government of Canada through the Ministry of Women and Gender Equality and the National Health Service in Britain. He has nearly 50 publications with 25 of these in peer-reviewed academic journals. He is the author of Capitalist Buddha: Waking up to Conscious Economics.

Dr. Overall first became a university professor at 30 years old. He has been an academic for over a decade. He was a tenured professor at Ontario Tech University in Canada. Before that, he held professorships at Nipissing University in Canada, Ryerson University in Canada, and Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany. He taught at the St. Petersburg Polytechinical University in Russia and the University of Bradford School of Management in Britain.

Dr. Overall’s Website.

Dr. Overall’s book.

Dr. Overall’s Google Scholar.

Dr. Brian Lord

Brian Lord, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Science Enhanced Mindful Awareness (SEMA) Lab under the advisement of John Allen and Jay Sanguinetti, holds a PhD in Psychology. His research investigates how non-invasive brain stimulation can modify brain activity as measured by fMRI and EEG to influence experiential factors like the sense of self and mindfulness. Brian’s work aims to deepen our understanding of exotic states of consciousness, working at the intersection of psychophysiology and experiential science. He also holds a B.S. in Biopsychology from Oglethorpe University and an M.A. in Humanistic Psychology from the University of West Georgia. During his time at the University of West Georgia, he worked as an archivist with the renowned remote viewer Ingo Swann’s collection, enriching his perspective on the boundaries of human cognition and consciousness.

Chelley Sherman

Chelley Sherman is a creative technologist and liminal researcher whose work, through immersive installations, data-driven biosimulations and digital recreations of complex dynamical and self organizing systems, delves into the nature of non-ordinary states of consciousness, perceptual illusions, and contemplative practice. These computational models give rise to emergent, lifelike patterns and behaviors that form the foundation of their immersive works, which become, in essence, a meditative psychocosmogram. Her works draw the viewer through noetic perception and symbolic representation to connect to a higher dimensional order of understanding, inviting them to explore the profound depths of consciousness and the fundamental nature of reality.

Through the expressive medium of computation, Chelley leverages concepts like annealing, optics, fluid dynamics, and agent-driven behaviors to evoke the ineffable essence of consciousness and its multifaceted expressions in the physical and metaphysical realms. These practices inspire patterns of creation and expressive cosmologies that connect to a broader sense of vastness and the fluid, ever-changing nature of perception.

Over the years, Chelley’s portfolio has expanded to include acclaimed VR installations that have garnered recognition such as the United Nations Women’s Global Film Festival featured artist. Her work has been featured in renowned multimedia festivals like SXSW, Nuit Blache and Mutek. Notably, Chelley’s contributions to the development of real-time systems at Sphere Las Vegas and for Emmy Award-nominated immersive films have been highlighted in Time Magazine as pioneering advancements in technology and along with collaborations with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her works have also been featured in the Creators Project, Forbes, Wired, TechCrunch and BBC Radio.

Dr. D.E. Osto

D.E. Osto (they/them), BA, MTS, MA, PhD, has advanced degrees in Theological Studies, Asian Languages and Literature, and the Study of Religions from Harvard University, The University of Washington and The University of London. They are the author of Paranormal States: Psychic Abilities in Buddhist Convert Communities (Columbia, 2024), and Altered States: Buddhism and Psychedelic Spirituality in America (Columbia, 2016), among other books. Currently, they are an independent scholar and Buddhist practitioner living in New Zealand.

Website

Nir Lahav

Nir Lahav finished his PhD in physics from Bar Ilan university in Israel. His field of research is consciousness studies, nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory and relativity with applications for cognitive science and neuroscience. In 2022 he published the Relativistic Theory of Consciousness – a new physical theory of consciousness based on the principle of relativity. Nowadays, he is doing his postdoctoral research in the Consciousness and Cognition lab in Cambridge University in the UK to test the theory.

Dr. Yair Dor-Ziderman

Dr. Yair Dor-Ziderman is a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in self-awareness, existential threat processing, and the effects of contemplative practices on the brain. He is a research fellow at the Integrated Brain and Behavior Research Center (IBBRC) at the University of Haifa. His research explores neural mechanisms of self-specific processes, death-denial, and the dissolution of self-boundaries, particularly in meditative and psychedelic contexts. Dr. Dor-Ziderman has developed cutting-edge MEG neuroimaging techniques to study how the brain shields the self from mortality awareness and how these processes may be altered through meditation and psychedelics like ayahuasca.

He is fascinated by how the brain creates a self and comes to believe it will live forever. His research focuses on whether and how psychedelic and meditation-induced self/ego-dissolution experiences can help the brain ‘forget’ its self and accept its finitude. Combining cognitive neuroscience, phenomenology, meditation, and existential science, Dr. Dor-Ziderman explores how these experiences reshape our understanding of the self and death, offering new insights into how mental training can lead to greater acceptance of life’s impermanence.

Patrick McConnell

Patrick A. McConnell, PhD earned his doctorate in neuroscience from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) as an NIH NIDA T32 Predoctoral Fellow under the guidance of Dr. Brett Froeliger. During his PhD, he conducted research focused on characterizing neuroendophenotypes of substance-use disorders and identifying brain-behavior predictors of addiction treatment response. Following this, Patrick briefly continued at MUSC as an NIH NINDS StrokeNet Postdoctoral Fellow, where he worked on optimizing the integration of autonomic physiological data collected during fMRI to inform neurorehabilitation interventions for chronic stroke survivors. In August 2024, Patrick joined UCSF as a NIDA T32 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, working under the joint mentorship of Drs. Robin Carhart-Harris and Lorenzo Pasquini.

His current research explores the neuropsychopharmacology of classical and atypical psychedelics, with a focus on developing neuroimaging-based phase II clinical trials to evaluate novel psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies for substance-use disorders, particularly methamphetamine-use disorder and polysubstance abuse. Patrick also holds a master’s degree in exercise science and sport psychology from Ithaca College. Outside of his work to advance addiction treatment and neuroimaging research, Patrick is passionate about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, meditation, and cats.

Dr. Daniel M. Ingram

Dr. Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH, volunteers to lend organization, structure, administration, networking, vision, funding, incubation, and other forms of support to the EPRC. He is also the founder and acting CEO and Board Chair of Emergence Benefactors, a charity dedicated to supporting the EPRC.

Informed by medical ethics and the mandate for informed consent, his current research interests include finding ways to bring clinical competence, data-backed diagnostic and management strategies, and options for disconcerting emergent phenomena to therapists and other healthcare providers, particularly those in emergency medicine, as well as to use scientific methods to help emergent practitioners optimize their practice for good outcomes and to match their risk tolerances.

He was a board certified emergency medicine physician for 12 years, mostly working in major trauma centers. His MSPH is in epidemiology.

His personal page may be found here: Integrated Daniel