Summit Presenters

Rick Hanson, PhD

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a psychologist, Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and New York Times best-selling author. His books are available in 28 languages and include Neurodharma, Resilient, Hardwiring Happiness, Buddha’s Brain, Just One Thing, and Mother Nurture – with 900,000 copies in English alone. He edits the Wise Brain Bulletin and has numerous audio programs. A summa cum laude graduate of UCLA and founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, he’s been an invited speaker at NASA and Google, and at Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, and other major universities, and he’s taught in meditation centers worldwide.

Dr. Hanson has been a trustee of Saybrook University, served on the board of Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and was president of the board of FamilyWorks, a community agency. He began meditating in 1974, trained in several traditions, and leads a weekly meditation gathering in San Rafael, California. His work has been featured on the BBC, CBS, and NPR, and he offers the free Just One Thing newsletter with 150,000 subscribers, plus the online Foundations of Well-Being program in positive neuroplasticity that anyone with financial need can do for free.

Learn more about Rick at his website.

Rhonda Magee, MA, JD

Rhonda V. Magee (M.A. Sociology, J.D.) is a Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco and an internationally-recognized thought and practice leader focused on compassionate conflict engagement, holistic problem-solving to alleviate the suffering of the vulnerable and injured, presence-based leadership in a diverse world, and humanizing approaches to education. She sees embodied mindfulness meditation and the allied disciplines of study and community engagement as keys to personal, interpersonal, and collective transformation in the face of the challenges and opportunities of our time.

Rhonda is the author of The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness, which was published in September of 2019. You can learn more about Rhonda and her work on her website.

Kristin Neff, PhD

Kristin Neff is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a pioneer in the field of self-compassion research, conducting the first empirical studies on self-compassion over fifteen years ago. In addition to her academic research, she has co-developed an empirically supported training program called Mindful Self-Compassion, and is author of the books Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook, and Teaching the Mindful Self-Compassion Program: A Guide for Professionals. For more information on self-compassion, including a self-compassion test, research articles, practices, and Dr. Neff's teaching schedule, you can visit her website.

Dan Siegel, MD

Dr. Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. He is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute which focuses on the development of mindsight, which teaches insight, empathy, and integration in individuals, families and communities. Dr. Siegel has published extensively for both the professional and lay audiences. His five New York Times bestsellers are: Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain, and two books with Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D: The Whole-Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline. His other books include: The Developing Mind, The Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, Mindsight, The Mindful Brain, The Mindful Therapist, and also with Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D. - The Yes Brain and The Power of Showing Up (released January 2020). Dr. Siegel also serves as the Founding Editor for the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology which contains over seventy textbooks.

For more information about his educational programs and resources, please visit his website or check out the Mindsight Institute.

Tara Brach, PhD

Tara Brach, Ph.D is an internationally known meditation teacher, psychologist and author of bestselling Radical Acceptance (2003) and Radical Compassion (2020.) In Radical Compassion, a heartfelt and deeply practical book, Tara Brach explores RAIN: an antidote to the ever-increasing onslaught of news, conflict, demands, and anxieties that leave us rushing around on auto-pilot and cut off from the presence and creativity that give our lives meaning. Tara offers a popular weekly podcast that is downloaded about two million times a month, and is active in bringing meditation into DC area schools, prisons and to underserved populations. Along with her colleague, Jack Kornfield, Tara leads a meditation teacher training that currently serves participants from 49 countries around the globe.

To learn more about Tara Brach and enjoy free access to hundreds of talks, guided-meditations and other helpful resources, please visit her website.

Parneet Pal, MBBS, MS

Parneet Pal, MBBS, MS is the Chief Science Officer at Wisdom Labs, a San Francisco-based company solving for stress, burnout, and loneliness in the workplace. A Harvard-trained physician, she focuses on the intersection of lifestyle medicine, behavior change and technology and building wiser workplaces using the science of mindfulness, resilience and compassion. She has written for the Harvard Business Review, is a TEDMED scholar and has been featured on the cover of Mindful magazine. Find out more about Wisdom Labs and Wise@Work Communities.

Jeremy Hunter, PhD

Jeremy Hunter, PhD serves as the Founding Director of the Executive Mind Leadership Institute as well as Associate Professor of Practice at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management. He is also a co-founder and partner of Transform LLC in Tokyo, Japan. He created and teaches The Executive Mind, a series of demanding and transformative executive education programs. They are dedicated to Drucker’s assertion that “You cannot manage other people unless you manage yourself first.” He has designed and led leadership development programs for a wide variety of organizations, including Fortune 200 aerospace, Fortune 50 banking and finance, accounting, the arts and civic non-profits. Program impacts have lead to both positive professional, personal and financial outcomes for participants. Hunter has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio’s Morning Edition.

Dr. Hunter received his Ph.D. from University of Chicago, and also holds a degree in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and in East Asian Studies from Wittenberg University. For more information about Dr. Hunter or his programs and resources, please visit his website or watch his TED Talk.

Kelly McGonigal, PhD

Kelly McGonigal is a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University who specializes in understanding the mind-body connection. Her mission is to translate insights from psychology and neuroscience into practical strategies that support personal well-being and strengthen communities. She is the best-selling author of The Willpower Instinct and The Upside of Stress. Through the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism, she helped create Stanford Compassion Cultivation Training, a program now taught around the world that helps individuals strengthen their empathy, compassion, and self-compassion. You might know her from her TED talk, "How to Make Stress Your Friend," which is one of the most viewed TED talks of all time, with over 20 million views.

Her new book, The Joy of Movement, explores why physical exercise is a powerful antidote to the modern epidemics of depression, anxiety, and loneliness. You can learn more about Dr. McGonigal and her work at her website.

Oscar Medina

Oscar Paul Medina is a meditation educator, and transformative leader who is integrating the fields of consciousness and healing with community and restorative justice work. His personal battles with trauma and addiction led him to the path of meditation, somatic healing and ancestral indigenous wisdom. As a Dalai Lama Fellow and co-founder of Mindful Garden Collective, he created a community wellness garden and environmental restoration project centered around meditation, yoga, ecology, and growing organic food for Oakland families in need. At Mind Body Awareness Project, he has been leading mindfulness and healing circles with inner-city youth, incarcerated populations, along with educators and community workers, since 2014. Currently, he is co-leading a project that is providing mindfulness and trauma resilience training to Alameda County Sherff's Department deputies, clinical staff, and incarcerated populations at Santa Rita Jail. He is a 2020 Culture of Health Fellow, and is building a movement to empower Latinx communities and leaders on the leading edge science of mindfulness, trauma-resilience, well-being and wisdom.

Zeenat Potia, MA

Zeenat Potia teaches mindfulness in Boston, and is an instructor for Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare and eMindful. She has also taught meditation at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center since 2014, and served on the Board of Directors from 2012-2019. She integrates a business career of over 20 years in strategic communications in her corporate offerings. As an immigrant and a working mother, her teaching stems from an aspiration to create a more inclusive and sustainable world. To learn more about Zeenat and her work, visit her website.

Elisha Goldstein, PhD

Elisha Goldstein, PhD is creator of founder of the 6-month online coaching program, A Course in Mindful Living (starts again March 24, 2020), founder of the Mindful Living Collective and co-founder of The Center for Mindful Living in Los Angeles.

Elisha is offering an amazing opportunity to go deeper into the topics explored in his interview! Learn more about A Course in Mindful Living and register here. Registration will be open from March 17-20th, and a 4-part video series leading up to the event will be accessible starting March 5th.

Rosa Gonzalez

Rosa González is dedicated to fundamental shifts towards health & balance at all levels from the personal to the structural. She teaches yoga and breathing meditation through the International Association for Human Values and TLEX (Transformational Leadership for Excellence). She is a senior fellow at the Movement Strategy Center and the founder of Facilitating Power, a consultancy designed to cultivate, through deep partnership, the practice & pedagogy of a living democracy. She is currently working on her first book, titled: SEED, HARVEST, WEAVE Facilitative Leadership for a Living Democracy.

Oscar and Rosa will be leading a course, produced by Mindful, called How To Meditate: A culturally rooted approach to Mindfulness for Latino/x communities, or Como Meditar: La Practica de Plena Conciencia desde la perspectiva cultural Latina/x. If you would like to be in touch with them about their work, you can reach them at oscarpaulmedina1@gmail.com and rosa@facilitatingpower.com.

Mark Coleman

Mark is an inner and outer explorer, who has devotedly studied mindfulness meditation practices for three decades. He is passionate about sharing the power of meditation and has taught mindfulness workshops, meditation and wilderness meditation retreats internationally for the past twenty years. Mark is an unabashed nature lover and, through his organization Awake in the Wild, he shares his passion for integrating meditation and nature.

Diana Winston

Diana Winston is the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC). She is the author of The Little Book of Being and the co-author of Fully Present: The Science, Art and Practice of Mindfulness. She has taught mindfulness for health and well-being since 1999 in a range of settings including in healthcare, universities, businesses, non-profits, and schools. She created the evidence-based Mindful Awareness Practices Program (MAPs) and UCLA’s Training in Mindfulness Facilitation. She is the mom of a 10 year old and a furry rescue dog. For more information about Diana and her work, visit her website.

Wendy Palmer

Wendy Palmer is the founder of LEADERSHIP EMBODIMENT, a process using principles from the non-violent martial art of Aikido and mindfulness to offer simple practices to increase leadership capacity and respond to stress and pressure with greater confidence and integrity. Wendy holds a sixth degree black belt in Aikido and has practiced mindfulness for over 45 years. Her organization, LEADERSHIP EMBODIMENT offers training to experienced coaches and facilitators wishing to teach Leadership Presence. Wendy's most recent book is Leadership Embodiment: How the Way We Sit and Stand Can Change the Way We Think and Speak, and she is currently working on a new book, About Dragons and Power, which will be available on Amazon.

Peter Weng

Peter Weng is the Chief Executive Officer of Healthy Minds Innovations. Peter is focused on helping organizations adopt science-based practices that support mental well-being and performance. He implemented systems of well-being and performance as a leader in large corporations and is regularly invited to share these experiences with corporations, governmental organizations, NGOs, and conferences around the world. Prior to HMI, Peter was the Chief Business Officer at the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. Peter also spent many years in technology as an executive at Google and Dell while living and working in the United States, United Kingdom, China, and Poland. He held management and engineering positions in industrial water treatment at Rohm and Haas and Argo Scientific. Peter has served on the board of the Insight Santa Cruz meditation center and founded music, dance, and sustainable transportation community organizations.

Jenée Johnson

Jenée Johnson, Program Innovation Leader: Mindfulness, Trauma and Racial Healing, leads the unique effort to bring mindfulness into public health practices and programs though the Trauma Informed Systems of Care Initiative in San Francisco. Her work is featured as the cover story in the October, 2019 issue of Mindful Magazine, and she was recently recognized by her peers as a Powerful Woman in the Mindfulness Movement. Jenée is the founder of The Right Within Experience, an experiential mindfulness program that reclaims humanity, joy and wellbeing for Black people through mindfulness practices.

Jenée Johnson is a certified professional co-active coach and certified by Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute to teach mindfulness and emotional intelligence. She is a trauma trainer, Emotional Emancipation Circles Facilitator (Association of Black Psychologists) and certified to teach Femme!, a meditative movement and wellness modality for women. She is a coach and consultant with Sankofa Holistic Counseling Services in the Oakland.

Mark Bertin, MD

Dr. Bertin is a developmental pediatrician and author of How Children Thrive, Mindful Parenting for ADHD and The Family ADHD Solution, which integrate mindfulness into the rest of evidence-based pediatric care. He is a contributing author for the book Teaching Mindfulness Skills to Kids and Teens. Dr. Bertin is on faculty at New York Medical College and the Windward Teacher Training Institute, and on the advisory boards for the non-profits Common Sense Media and Reach Out and Read. He is a regular contributor to Mindful Magazine, and his blog is available through Mindful.org and Psychology Today. For more information, please visit his website.

Rona Wilensky, PhD

Rona Wilensky is Director of Mindfulness Programs at PassageWorks Institute where she teaches SMART in Education, a mindfulness program for educators. From 1992- 2009 she was founding principal of New Vista High School, an innovative public high school of choice in Boulder, Colorado. She is a Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute and was member of the Leadership Council of the Garrison Institute’s Initiative on Contemplative Teaching and Learning. Rona holds a B.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University and taught that subject at Williams College and the University of Denver in the early 1980’s.

Check out Rona's work at PassageWorks.

Anne Alexander

Anne Alexander is the Content Director for Mindful. She is a dynamic, entrepreneurial leader driven by a passion for empowering people to realize their full potential. Two-time New York Times best-selling author and SVP/Editorial Director at National Geographic, Anne has been creating consumer-centric content fueled by an awareness and aliveness gained through meditation and mindfulness. An active yoga instructor, Anne lives in Pennsylvania with her three teenage children, two cats and a dog.