Speakers

Ronald Epstein, MD

Dr. Ronald Epstein, internationally recognized family physician, palliative care physician, educator, researcher and writer, has devoted his career to understanding and improving communication and mindfulness in medicine. His scholarly articles have revolutionized doctors’ view of their work, and his book, Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness and Humanity (Scribner, 2017) shows how becoming mindful can transform healthcare, build strong connections between doctors and patients, and help clinicians flourish while providing the best care for patients. He has over 250 publications, including Mindful Practice (Journal of the American Medical Association, 1999) which catalyzed the incorporation of mindfulness in medicine and medical education. You can learn more about Dr. Epstein and his work at his website.

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.

Richard Davidson, PhD

Dr. Richard Davidson’s research is broadly focused on the neural bases of emotion and emotional style and methods to promote human flourishing including meditation and related contemplative practices. He has published over 400 articles, numerous chapters and reviews and edited 14 books. He is the author (with Sharon Begley) of The Emotional Life of Your Brain published in 2012 and co-author with Daniel Goleman of Altered Traits published in 2017. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 and appointed to the Governing Board of UNESCO’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) in 2018. To learn more about Dr. Davidson and his work, visit the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Cheryl Woods Giscombe, PhD, RN, PMHNP-BC, FAAN

Dr. Cheryl Woods Giscombe is the LeVine Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Quality of Life, Health Promotion and Wellness at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing. Dr. Giscombe is also an adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Medicine and the Director of the Interprofessional Leadership Institute for Behavioral Health Equity. She is a health psychologist and a psychiatric nurse practitioner. Her research focuses on stress management to improve health among diverse populations, with specific emphasis on the health and well-being of African American women. Dr. Giscombe developed the groundbreaking Superwoman Schema conceptual framework and questionnaire to conduct research on stress and health in African American women. Dr. Giscombe's research is highly regarded for its focus on culturally-sensitive strategies to reduce health disparities, including the incorporation of mindfulness-based stress reduction in African Americans and other underserved populations.

Reena Kotecha, MBBS, BSc Hons

Dr. Reena Kotecha is a medical physician trained at Imperial College London, UK, where she specialised in neuroscience and mental well-being research.Having spent the early part of her career in the National Health Service (NHS) as a hospital doctor Reena expanded her practice to focus on evidence-based approaches that improve employee health and well-being. She developed the ‘Mindful Medics’ programme which continues to enhance the personal and professional lives of many healthcare professionals. Alongside this Reena works in corporate education as a consultant in global organizations across both private and public sectors. Learn more about Reena and her work on her website.

Rick Hanson, PhD

Rick Hanson, PhD is a psychologist, Senior Fellow of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and New York Times best-selling author. His books have been published in 29 languages and include Neurodharma, Resilient, Hardwiring Happiness, Buddha’s Brain, Just One Thing, and Mother Nurture – with 900,000 copies in English alone. His free weekly newsletter has 180,000 subscribers and his online programs have scholarships available for those with financial need. He’s lectured at NASA, Google, Oxford, and Harvard, and taught in meditation centers worldwide. An expert on positive neuroplasticity, his work has been featured on the BBC, CBS, NPR, and other major media. He began meditating in 1974 and is the founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom. You can learn more about Dr. Hanson and his work on his website.

Arpan Waghray, MD

Dr. Arpan Waghray is a geriatric psychiatrist, who serves as Chief Medical Officer of Well Being Trust, a national foundation dedicated to advancing a vision of a nation where everyone is well in mental, social and spiritual health. He also serves in the capacity of Executive Medical Director for behavioral medicine at Swedish Health Services, where he oversees an integrated program across primary care clinics, a perinatal mood disorders program, consultation liaison services, treatment resistant depression program, inpatient psychiatry units and partial hospitalization programs. He is also the co-chair of the Providence St. Joseph Health Behavioral Medicine Clinical Performance Group. In this role, he facilitates clinical collaboration across the organization to design, develop and deploy solutions that reduce variation and spread innovation and oversees the systems tele-behavioral health network. Dr. Waghray completed his medical school training in India, a residency at Brookdale University Medical Center in New York and a fellowship at the University of Washington. He later completed a leadership development program through the Washington State Medical Association designed for physician leaders, as well as an executive development program at the Michael G. Foster School of Business.

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. 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 information about self-compassion, including a self-compassion text, research articles, guided meditations and practices, visit her website.

Kristen has also developed a training specifically for healthcare providers called Self Compassion for Healthcare Communities. To learn more about this training visit the website here.

Daniel Goleman, PhD

Daniel Goleman, PhD has just launched an Emotional Intelligence Coaching Certification with KeyStepMedia and he currently co-directs the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University. He's the author of New York Times bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, and many others, including Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, written with Richard Davidson. To find out more about Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence Coaching Certification visit the website here.

Eve Ekman, PhD, MSW

Eve Ekman is a Senior Fellow at the University of California Berkeley Greater Good Science Center, Director of Cultivating Emotional Balance Training Program and volunteer clinical faculty at the UCSF Department of Pediatrics. She is contemplative social scientist and teacher in the fields of emotional awareness and burnout prevention. She draws on advanced training and life experiences in clinical social work, integrative medicine research, and contemplative meditation practices and science. Eve is a second generation emotion researcher and has had meaningful collaborations with her father, renowned emotion researcher Dr. Paul Ekman. Their most recent project, The Atlas of Emotions, is an online visual tool to teach emotional awareness, a project commissioned and supported by the Dalai Lama. Eve is a founding teacher for Cultivating Emotional Balance, an evidenced based training committed to utilizing the experience of emotion as a path for developing the happiness of being for ourselves and in relationship to others.

Sebene Selassie

Sebene Selassie is a teacher, author and speaker who began studying Buddhism 30 years ago as an undergraduate at McGill University where she majored in Comparative Religious Studies. She has an MA from the New School where she focused on race and cultural studies. She has been teaching classes, workshops and retreats for the past decade. Sebene is a three-time cancer survivor of Stage III and IV breast cancer. Her first book is You Belong: A Call for Connection (HarperOne). You can learn more about her work on her website and connect with her on Instagram.

Michael Krasner, MD, FACP

Michael Krasner (he/him), MD, FACP is a Professor of Clinical Medicine and Professor of Clinical Family Medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, and practices full-time primary care internal medicine in Rochester, New York. Dr. Krasner has been teaching Mindfulness-Based programs to patients, medical students, and health professionals for more than 20 years, involving over 3500 participants and more than 1500 health professionals, and continues to facilitate Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for employees and dependents of the University of Rochester. He was the project director of Mindful Communication: Bringing Intention, Attention, and Reflection to Clinical Practice, sponsored by the New York Chapter of the American College of Physicians, funded by the Physicians Foundation for Health Systems Excellence, with results reported in JAMA in September 2009. This program led to the establishment of Mindful Practice Programs at the University of Rochester which he co-directs, offering continuing educational programs to health professionals and educators locally and internationally for the past 10 years, and includes a multi-year teacher training program for future facilitators of Mindful Practice. He is engaged in a variety of research projects including the investigations of the effects of mindfulness practices on the immune system in the elderly, on chronic psoriasis, and on caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients. You can learn more about his work at the Mindful Practice website and Facebook page.

Janice E. Nevin, M.D., MPH

A visionary and collaborative health care leader, Janice E. Nevin, M.D., MPH, is president and CEO of ChristianaCare. Dr. Nevin is pioneering value-based care, leading a transformation from a health care system to a system that impacts health. She is nationally recognized for innovation in patient/family-centered care and population health. In 2019, Dr. Nevin was selected as one of Modern Healthcare’s Top 25 Women Leaders and in 2020 she was named to Modern Healthcare’s 50 Most Influential Clinical Executives.

Zev Schuman-Olivier, MD

Zev Schuman-Olivier, MD is the Director of the CHA Center for Mindfulness and Compassion, Medical Director for Addiction Services as well as Director of Addiction Residency Education and Mindful Mental Health Service at CHA. Dr. Schuman-Oliver is faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Data Sciences at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. As a board-certified addiction psychiatrist, he has been involved with research and clinical care of patients with addiction, mental illness, and chronic pain both in mental health and primary care settings. He is a founding member of the Mindfulness Research Collaborative and is part of the NIH Science of Behavior Change Initiative. He is principal investigator of the MINDFUL-PC project, which is leading the way in integrating mindfulness into the patient-centered medical home. He is Director of the Clinical Core for the NCCIH program project grant on synergistic approaches to chronic pain treatment. Finally, he led the development of the MySafeRx integrated technology platform and has been studying the impact of compassionate, motivational mobile recovery coaching and remote daily supervised medication dosing on medication adherence during opioid use disorder treatment.


For a downloadable handout of the STOP-ACHE-GO practice click here.

Cynda Hylton Rushton, PHD, MSN, RN

Cynda H. Rushton, recognized as an international leader in nursing ethics, is the Anne and George L. Bunting Professor of Clinical Ethics in the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the School of Nursing, and co-chairs the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Ethics Committee and Consultation Service. She focuses on moral suffering in healthcare, cultivating moral resilience and designing ethical practice environments. She was a member of the National Academies report:Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-being. She is the editor and author of Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering in Healthcare and is core faculty of Upaya Institute's Being with Dying and GRACE programs bringing contemplative practice to the bedside and beyond. You can find resources for frontline clinicians from Dr. Rushton here.

Jodi Halpern MD, PhD

Jodi Halpern is a Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities in the Joint Medical Program and the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. She is the co-founder and co-lead of the Berkeley Group for the Ethics and Regulation of Innovative Technologies. Her work brings together psychiatry, philosophy, affective forecasting and decision science to elucidate how people imagine and influence their own and each other’s future health possibilities. Her first book, From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice was called a “seminal work” by the Journal of the American Medical Association. Her scholarly articles focus on topics that include research and medical ethics, emotions, and decision-making and the ethics of innovative technologies. Her work appears in publications such as the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Journal of Medical Ethics, Emotion Review, Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience, Gerontology and Global Public Health as well as in popular media. Halpern is also doing embedded research with scientists developing new technologies including gene editing. Halpern is invited to present her work internationally, including at the 2018 and 2019 meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Hani Chaabo, MD

Dr. Chaabo is a family medicine physician and mindfulness teacher specializing in integrative medicine. He helps people lead a life full of their fullest potential. His experience ranges from working with refugees living in camps in Lebanon, to implementing healthcare institutional wellbeing initiatives in the United States. He is trained in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) which is the most extensively studied mindfulness intervention in healthcare. He developed a mindfulness based lifestyle change program delivered in individual, online and group settings, and currently runs a stress reduction clinic in an underserved area of California. You can learn more about his work at the Stress Reduction Clinic here.

Beth Lown, MD

Beth Lown is the Chief Medical Officer of the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare, a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening the relationships among patients, families and clinicians and advancing compassionate health care. In this role she develops and implements programs, curricula and research. She speaks locally, nationally and internationally about empathy, compassion and communication, and teaches these attributes and skills to health professionals across the continuum of learning. She has also served as president and board member of the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare. This service included organizing collaborative relationships and conferences with the European Academy on Communication in Healthcare. She has served on several test materials development and standard setting committees, task forces and consulting teams for Clinical/Communication Skills for the National Board of Medical Examiners and the United States Medical Licensing Examination (Step 2 of the USMLE). Dr. Lown is associate professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA and director of Faculty Development at Mount Auburn Hospital, Cambridge, MA. She has co-led several fellowships in medical education for faculty within the Harvard Medical School system, and is the director of the only longitudinal interprofessional fellowship in health professional education in the Harvard Medical School system.

Krista Gregory, MDiv, BCC

Krista Gregory is a Board Certified Chaplain who has worked in healthcare for over 25 years in both adult and pediatric hospitals. Experiencing burnout and witnessing others burnout as well, she founded the Center for Resiliency in 2016 to transform healthcare into a more sustainable environment. Since then, she and her team have researched and developed practical, daily tools that restore medical professionals to their humanity. Krista has also spearheaded efforts to address the systemic factors that contribute to a toxic medical culture, such as improving team and organizational communication. She is a Trained Teacher in Mindful Self-Compassion and co-designer of the Teacher Training for the course Self-Compassion for Healthcare Communities with the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion. She is a dynamic speaker, conference presenter, and thought leader in the field of wellness and resiliency.

Joshua Cutler, LICSW

Josh Cutler is a psychotherapist, licensed clinical social worker, and innovator in the mental health field. He leads a team of behavioral health specialists providing evidenced based interventions, including mindfulness, to caregivers working in the hospitals and clinics of Providence St. Joseph Health, our nation’s 3rd largest health system. He regularly facilitates workshops on wellness and burnout for healthcare providers. His experience spans transforming organizations in senior management roles, actively influencing public policy at a state and national level, and working in a range of clinical settings with individuals and families to achieve mental wellness. His current focus is on utilizing cutting edge technology to increase access to empirically supported behavioral health treatments.

Anita Chakravarti, MD

Dr. Anita Chakravarti is a professor at the College of Medicine, UofS, for over 30 years. In addition to providing service in Clinical Anesthesiology and Intensive Care, she was the first Medical Director of the regional Chronic Pain Centre. She was on the National Task Force to have Pain Medicine recognized as a sub specialty of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, on the Pain Education Committee of the Canadian Pain Society, and Medical Advisor to the Canadian Pain Coalition. Dr. Chakravarti has recently focused on wellness initiatives for healthcare and human service providers and was on the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Expert Working Group on Physician Health.  She has presented many interprofessional and interdisciplinary sessions on individual and organizational wellness both locally and nationally.  She has published two articles on Resident Wellness (Canadian Journal of Anesthesia February 2017) and was invited to University of Manitoba Department of Anesthesiology to help establish their program. She has presented this research at the International Conference on Residency Education (2016) and the Canadian Anesthesiologists’ Society (2018). You can learn more about Dr. Chakravarti work at [M]Power Mindful Professional Practice.

Frank Ostaseski

Frank Ostaseski is an internationally respected Buddhist teacher and visionary cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project, and founder of the Metta Institute. He has lectured at Harvard Medical School, the Mayo Clinic, numerous national and international hospice and palliative care conferences, Google Headquarters and other corporate settings. He also teaches at major spiritual centers around the globe. Frank is the 2018 recipient of the prestigious Humanities Award from the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. His groundbreaking work has been featured on the Bill Moyers PBS series On Our Own Terms, highlighted on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and honored by H.H. the Dalai Lama. He is the author of The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully.

Phoebe Long Franco, PHD

Phoebe received her PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. As the Research Scientist for the Center for Resiliency, she utilizes quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how resiliency interventions influence healthcare professionals’ well-being and professional fulfillment. She is a Trained Teacher in Mindful Self-Compassion and a Teacher Trainer for the course, Self-Compassion for Healthcare Communities. Her research and writing on self-compassion and resiliency can be read in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Clinical Psychology, Self and Identity, Learning and Individual Differences, and the online magazine Greater Good.

Mark Bertin, MD

Mark Bertin, MD 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.

Parneet Pal, M.B.B.S., M.S

Parneet Pal is a Harvard-trained physician, working at the intersection of lifestyle medicine, behavior change and technology. As the Chief Science Officer, Wisdom Labs, she solves for stress, burnout, and loneliness in the workplace, using the science of mindfulness, resilience and compassion. An educator at heart, Parneet is an international speaker; podcast host at Wise@Work podcast; TEDMED scholar; writes for various publications including Harvard Business Review and was featured on the cover of Mindful magazine. Connect with Parneet on LinkedIn.

Rheanna Hoffmann, RN, BSN

Rheanna Hoffmann, RN, BSN, NC, is an emergency nurse, coach, and meditation guide. She is the Founder of The Whole Practitioner, a coaching business designed to help medical practitioners access and transmute their underlying causes of stress. In April - May, 2020, she traveled to NY to support a Brooklyn hospital in need during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis. On the frontlines, she saw the toll that the virus ravaged on her patients' physiology, her co-workers' mental health, and on the social structures of the city itself. Previously she has worked in emergency, oncology, hospice, and Indigenous medicine, and on death row. She is trained in somatic and wilderness therapy, and is a certified auricular acupuncture specialist. She aspires to create environments where medical practitioners and students discover how their personality, values, and hidden gifts can align with their work.