The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds

John Dunne, PhD

John Dunne is a visiting contemplative scholar for the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Emory University, where he is Co-Director of the Encyclopedia of Contemplative Practices and the Emory Collaborative for Contemplative Studies. He was educated at Amherst College and Harvard University, where he received his PhD from the Committee on the Study of Religion in 1999. Before joining Emory's faculty in 2005, he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and held a research position at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

His work focuses on various aspects of Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice. In Foundations of Dharmakirti's Philosophy (2004), he examines the most prominent Buddhist theories of perception, language, inference and justification. His current research includes an inquiry into the notion of "mindfulness" in both classical Buddhist and contemporary contexts, and he is also engaged in a study of Candrakirti's "Prasannapada", a major Buddhist philosophical work on the metaphysics of "emptiness." His recently published work includes an essay on neuroscience and meditation co-authored with Richard J. Davidson, Antoine Lutz and Heleen Slagter. He frequently serves as a translator for Tibetan scholars, and as a consultant, he has assisted Drs. Davidson and Lutz in their neuropsychological studies of Tibetan contemplative practices.

Geshe Thupten Jinpa, PhD

Geshe Thupten Jinpa was educated at the Shartse College of Ganden Monastic University, South India, where he received the Geshe Lharam degree. In addition, Jinpa holds a B.A. Honors in philosophy and a PhD in religious studies, both from Cambridge University. He taught for five years at Ganden monastery and worked as a research fellow in Eastern religions at Girton College, Cambridge University.

Jinpa has been a principal English translator to H.H. the Dalai Lama for over two decades and has translated and edited numerous books by the Dalai Lama including Ethics for the New Millennium, Transforming the Mind, The World of Tibetan Buddhism and The Universe in a Single Atom: Convergence of Science and is the President of the Institute of Tibetan Classics.

Jinpa is an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University, Montreal and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Neuroscience Institute, Stanford University. He is currently the president of the Institute of Tibetan Classics.

David E. Meyer, PhD

Currently, David E. Meyer is a faculty member of the Cognition and Perception Program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A mathematical psychologist and cognitive scientist, he received his doctorate degree from Michigan and subsequently worked for almost a decade as a member of technical staff in the Human Information Processing Research Department at the Bell Telephone Laboratories before returning to academe. Numerous reports of his research have appeared in books and journals such as Science, the Psychological Review, Cognitive Psychology, Memory & Cognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Memory and Language, and volumes of the Attention and Performance symposium series. The American Psychological Association has honored him with its Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. In addition, the Association for Psychological Science has given Prof. Meyer its William James Fellow Award for lifetime achievement in basic research.