Norman Adler
Norman Tenner Adler’s research teaching, writing and academic administration represent significant contributions to the moderns study of biological psychology. Adler played a pioneering role in what was subsequently designated biological and evolutionary psychology. Adler’s research lies at the interface between biology and behavior.
Professor Adler is a prominent figure in American higher education, and in particular, defining the role of behavioral neuroscience in the liberal arts education.
William Beeman
William O. Beeman is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Best known as a Middle East Specialist for more than 30 years, he has also worked in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Japan, China and South Asia. Recognized for special expertise in Iranian culture and linguistics, he is the author or editor of more than 100 scholarly articles, 500 opinion pieces and 14 books, including Language, Status and Power in Iran, and The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other. He has also written extensively on music and performance traditions both in Western and non-Western traditions. His latest book on this topic is Iranian Performance Traditions. His co-authored book with Daniel Helfgot, The Third Line: The Singer as Interpreter has been widely used in teaching and research. His forthcoming book: The Meistersingers: Opera Performance in Germany centers on his experience as an opera performer in a leading German opera house. During 2013-2014 he is Visiting Scholar at Stanford University
Harry Ballan
Dr. Harry Ballan is a senior partner in the Tax Department of New York law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell.
He serves as vice chairman of the academic affairs committee and a member of the investment committee of Yeshiva University.
He has a BA from Yale College, a PhD in music history and theory from Yale, and a JD degree from Columbia Law School. Dr. Ballan has taught music at Yale, Brandeis, and Penn State, has held faculty appointments as Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, and has lectured at Columbia and Yale Universities.
Barbara Bogatin
Cellist Barbara Bogatin has been a member of the San Francisco Symphony since 1994. Prior to this appointment, she served as Principal Cellist and soloist with the New Jersey and Milwaukee Symphonies, and played frequently with the New York Philharmonic. She has performed with New York Chamber Soloists, Chamber Music Northwest, The Amati Trio, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Connecticut Early Music Festival, Stockholm Parktheater Chamber Music, Tahoe Summerfest and the Tiburon Chamber Players, and is a frequent performer on the San Francisco Symphony’s chamber music series at Davies Hall. In collaboration with her husband, neuroscientist Clifford Saron and meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein, she has presented workshops at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and the Esalen Institute. She received Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School.
Petr Janata
Petr Janata is a Professor of Psychology at the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis. He received his B.A. from Reed College and his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. After investigating song perception and song learning in songbirds as a postdoc at the University of Chicago, he went to Dartmouth College and incorporated functional neuroimaging methods into his music perception research. His projects have examined expectation, imagery, sensorimotor coupling, memory, and emotion in relation to tonality, rhythm, and timbre. His work emphasizes the use of models of musical structure to analyze behavioral and brain data, with a focus over the past decade on musical situations that elicit strong emotional experiences. In 2010 he received a Fulbright Fellowship to do research at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, and in the same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to further his investigation of what music-evoked autobiographical memories can tell us about the functional organization of the brain.
Tanya Luhrmann
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her books include Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, (Harvard, 1989); The Good Parsi (Harvard 1996); Of Two Minds (Knopf 2000) and When God Talks Back (Knopf 2012). In general, her work focuses on the way that ideas about the mind affect mental experience. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. In April 2014 she will receive the Grawemeyer Prize in Religion for When God Talks Back.
Bissera Pentcheva
Bissera Pentcheva's work focuses on Byzantium and the medieval Mediterranean, more specifically aesthetics and phenomenology. Her recent research on Hagia Sophia explores the interconnection among acoutsics, architecture, and liturgical rite. Pentcheva has published two books with Pennsylvania State University Press: Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium, 2006 that won the John Nicholas Brown prize form the Medieval Academy of America in 2010 and The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium, 2010.
Ricardo Rosenkranz
Ricardo T. Rosenkranz, M.D. is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. He earned his B.S. and M.S. in Biology at Stanford University and his medical degree from Cornell University Medical School. Dr. Rosenkranz completed his residency in Pediatrics and a Fellowship in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at Northwestern University.
He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Inovamed, S.A. de C.V. a provider for health care services in Mexico. Inovamed is credited with the successful financial and quality-driven turnaround of one of Mexico City's oldest private hospitals, and the construction and operation of one of the first hospitals in Mexico to achieve FDA clinical trial accreditation and Joint Commission International certification.
Since 2007 Dr. Rosenkranz has devoted a significant portion of his time to medical education. He has designed, led and participated in several courses, receiving multiple teaching awards.
Ricardo is the creator of the Humanities Seminar in Magic and Medicine for medical students. To date, over 150 students have participated in this popular course aimed at exploring the anthropology of magic and medicine as well as the performance aspects of the doctor-patient relationship.
Dr. Rosenkranz has been invited to present his Magic and Medicine curriculum for students, residents, faculty and mid-career physicians at Stanford University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and other national and international medical associations.
An avid Magician, Dr. Rosenkranz performs
regularly in several venues including The McBride Magic and Mystery School in
Las Vegas, where he is a regular guest faculty. The Chicago Tribune, Northwestern
Magazine and Magic Magazine have
profiled his work in Magic and Medicine. In 2014 Dr. Rosenkranz expects to
premiere his one man magic show titled "Soirées Magiques" and complete a book on Medicine, Meaning and
Magic
Clifford Saron
Clifford D. Saron is an Associate Research Scientist at the Center for Mind and Brain and MIND Institute at the University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1999. Dr. Saron has had a long-standing interest in the effects of contemplative practice on physiology and behavior. In the early 1990s, in collaboration with Francisco Varela, Alan Wallace, Richard Davidson, José Cabezón and others, he coordinated field research investigating Tibetan Buddhist mind training under the auspices of the Private Office of H. H. the Dalai Lama and the Mind and Life Institute. He has served on the Mind and Life Program and Research Council and been a frequent faculty member at the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute. Dr. Saron is Principal Investigator of the Shamatha Project, a multidisciplinary investigation of the effects of long-term intensive meditation on physiological and psychological processes central to well-being, attention, emotion regulation and health. It was conceived with and taught by Alan Wallace in collaboration with a large consortium of researchers at UC Davis and elsewhere. In 2012, Dr. Saron and his team were awarded the inaugural Templeton Prize Research Grant in honor of H. H. the Dalai Lama to continue work on the Shamatha Project. Recently, he was one of two neuroscientists selected to participate in the Mind and Life Institute’s efforts to promote contemplative science in multiple Asian venues. Dr. Saron’s other research area focuses on uni- and multisensory processing in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). These studies use electrophysiological and behavioral methods to better understand individual differences in how these children experience their everyday sensory environments. In new research, in collaboration with Elissa Epel, Will Kabat-Zinn, Teresa LaMendola and colleagues at UCSF, Dr. Saron is combining these strands of work, exploring how mindfulness-based interventions can ease the chronic stress of mothers of children with ASD in ways that may be beneficial for the whole family system and contribute to a lessoning of difficulties for the affected children.