Steven D. Hickman, PsyD
Director, UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness
Associate Clinical Professor
UC San Diego Department of Psychiatry
UC San Diego Department of Preventive and Family Medicine
La Jolla, CA

Steven Hickman, Psy.D., established the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness in 2002 and has taught Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for six years, "graduating" over 30 classes since that time. He is a clinical psychologist specializing in health psychology and works within the UC San Diego Medical Center and the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center providing treatment to patients with chronic pain, cancer and a variety of other primary medical problems. He teaches a graduate course in Mindfulness in Psychotherapy and has spoken at national conferences on the application of mindfulness in a variety of contexts and situations. He is also engaged in research on the application of mindfulness in a medical setting and has been a teacher for this 5-day Professional Training in MBCT since its inception in Southern California. Dr. Hickman is also currently co-authoring a book for Wiley-Blackwell Publishers on Mindfulness in Integrative Medicine.

Gina M. Biegel, MA, LMFT
Founder, Stressed Teens Program
Psychotherapist and Author
San Jose, CA

Gina M. Biegel, MA, LMFT, is a California-based psychotherapist currently in private practice in the Bay Area. She adapted the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program typically for adults for an adolescent population, and created the Stressed Teens, a program using the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Teens (MBSR-T) program. She conducts trainings, workshops and conferences on MBSR/MBSR-T with a variety of populations including professionals, teachers, parents, and teens in the U.S. and internationally. A more recent area of work is in bringing mindfulness into the California Elementary School system through her role as a member of the Research Advisory Board for Mindful Schools and assessed the effectiveness of such a program. Her first book, a workbook, entitled, The Stress Reduction Workbook for Teens: Mindfulness Skills to Help You Deal With Stress, is currently available as well as her audio CD, Mindfulness for Teens: Meditation Practices to Reduce Stress and Promote Well-Being.

Rick Hanson, PhD
Neuropsychologist and Author

Rick Hanson, PhD, is a neuropsychologist and author of the bestselling Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom (in 21 languages). Founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and Affiliate of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, he's taught at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and in meditation centers in Europe, North America, and Australia.

An authority on self-directed neuroplasticity, Dr. Hanson's work has been featured on the BBC, NPR, Consumer Reports Health, and U.S. News and World Report. He edits the Wise Brain Bulletin, and his weekly e-newsletter – Just One Thing – has over 20,000 subscribers, and also appears on Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and other major websites. Dr. Hanson is a trustee of Saybrook University and served on the board of Spirit Rock Meditation Center for nine years.

Susan Kaiser Greenland, JD
Author, Educator
Co-Founder, Inner Kids

Susan Kaiser Greenland is a former corporate attorney who developed the Inner Kids mindful awareness program for children, teens and their families. Research on the Inner Kids elementary school program was conducted at the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA and is published in the Journal of Applied School Psychology. Susan is author of The Mindful Child: How to Help Your Kid Manage Stress and Become Happier, Kinder, and More Compassionate (Free Press, 2010). She teaches children, parents and professionals around the world and consults with various organizations on teaching mindful awareness in an age-appropriate and secular manner. With her husband, Seth Greenland, she co-founded the Inner Kids Foundation. Susan lives in Los Angeles with her husband, and their two children. She can be found online at www.susankaisergreenland.com

Amishi P. Jha, PhD
Psychologist and Researcher
University of Miami

Amishi P. Jha, PhD is an Associate Professor at the University of Miami. She received her PhD from the University of California-Davis in 1998 and received post-doctoral training in functional neuroimaging at Duke University's Brain Imaging and Analysis Center. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, before joining the University of Miami in 2010 to spearhead the development of their Neuroimaging Center. Her research involves the use of functional MRI, electroencephalography (EEG), and neurobehavioral measures to investigate the basic mechanisms of attention, working memory, and mindfulness. Her work is supported by the Department of Army, NIH, and gifts from individuals and private foundations. She has received several awards for teaching and innovation in science.

Pamela Seigle, MS
Executive Director
Courage & Renewal Northeast

Pamela Seigle, MS is Executive Director of Courage & Renewal Northeast and founder of the nationally recognized Open Circle Program, a social and emotional learning program based at the Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College. She is co-author of the Open Circle Curriculum and the Open Circle Parent Program. She is on the Leadership Council of the Initiative on Contemplative Education at the Garrison Institute and the Passageworks Advisory Board. Pamela is a community activist in Boston. She served as a Trustee of the Boston Public Library and chaired its Trustees' Education Committee, which she founded to link the Library with public schools. She was a Director of the Boston Public Library Foundation and the Urban Libraries Council. She is currently a member of the Library's Compass Strategic Planning Committee. Pamela is on the board of the Conservatory Lab Charter School and the JazzBoston advisory Council.

Chip Wood, MSW
Author and Educator
Facilitator, Courage & Renewal Northeast

Chip Wood, MSW (Robert A. Wood) has been an activist in the fields of education and child development for the past forty years. He most recently served as Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Professional Development for the Gill-Montague Regional School District in Turners Falls, MA. He has extensive experience as a classroom teacher and principal in both public and private schools. He served as a national trainer and consultant for Gesell Institute of Child Development. He was a co-founder and co-developer of The Responsive Classroom® approach to professional development, and executive director of its non-profit organization, Northeast Foundation for Children. He is author of Yardsticks: Children in the Classroom, Ages 4-14 (NEFC,2007 revised),Time to Teach, Time to Learn: Changing the Pace of School (NEFC,1999),and co-author of Responsive School Discipline: Essentials for Elementary School Leaders (NEFC, in press) as well as numerous book chapters and articles. He writes a blog for parents and teachers at www.yardsticks4-14.com. He served on the Massachusetts Governor's Readiness Panel Sub-Committee on Expanded Teaching and Learning Time. He is also a facilitator with Courage & Renewal Northeast in Wellesley, MA, helping to provide retreat and renewal experiences for teachers and school leaders.

Gina M. Biegel, MA, LMFT
Founder, Stressed Teens Program
Psychotherapist and Author

Gina M. Biegel, MA, LMFT, is a California-based psychotherapist currently in private practice in the Bay Area. She adapted the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program typically for adults for an adolescent population, and created the Stressed Teens, a program using the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Teens (MBSR-T) program. She conducts trainings, workshops and conferences on MBSR/MBSR-T with a variety of populations including professionals, teachers, parents, and teens in the U.S. and internationally. A more recent area of work is in bringing mindfulness into the California Elementary School system through her role as a member of the Research Advisory Board for Mindful Schools and assessed the effectiveness of such a program. Her first book, a workbook, entitled, The Stress Reduction Workbook for Teens: Mindfulness Skills to Help You Deal With Stress, is currently available as well as her audio CD, Mindfulness for Teens: Meditation Practices to Reduce Stress and Promote Well-Being.

Megan Cowan
Co-Founder and Executive Director of Programs
Mindful Schools

Megan Cowan is Co-founder and Executive Director of Programs at Mindful Schools. Since 2007 Mindful Schools has provided training to more than 11,000 students in 40 schools and more than 2000 educators, other professionals, and parents. The Mindful Schools program teaches focus, self awareness, emotional regulation and empathy. Megan has been practicing mindfulness since 1996, and teaching mindfulness to children since 2001. Through the Mindful Schools program she has taught thousands of students and educators. She experiences great joy in offering these tools of awareness and compassion to young people, preparing them to influence peace in our world.

Margaret Cullen
Marriage and family counselor, certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
Teacher

Margaret Cullen is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Teacher. She has also trained with Zindel Segal in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and in MB Eat with Jean Kristeller. For seventeen years she has been teaching and pioneering mindfulness programs in a variety of settings including cancer support, HIV support, physician groups, executive groups, obesity and Kaiser patients. For seven years she has been involved in teaching and writing curricula for several research programs at UCSF including "Cultivating Emotional Balance" designed for teachers and "Craving and Lifestyle Management with Meditation" for overweight women. In 2008 she launched a mindfulness-based emotional balance program for teachers and school administrators in Denver, Boulder, Ann Arbor and Vancouver, B.C. She has also been a facilitator of support groups for cancer patients and their loved ones for twenty years at The Cancer Support Community and is currently a senior teacher at the Center for Compassion at Stanford. A meditation practitioner for n thirty years, she is a frequent contributor to "Inquiring Mind".

M. Lee Freedman, MD
Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist
Co-Founder, Mindfulness Toronto
Founder, Mindful Families and School

M. Lee Freedman, MD is a Toronto-based child and adolescent psychiatrist with 29 years of experience working with children, adolescents, parents and families under stress. Drawing upon her 27 years of experience as a parent of four sons and 10 years of experience with a personal mindfulness practice, she has been incorporating the teaching of mindful awareness practice to parents and children into her medical practice, and has witnessed the positive and lasting transformations in families who practice mindfulness in their daily lives. She teaches mindful parenting workshops to the general population as well as to parents of anxious children, teaches mindful photography workshops, and is beginning to co-facilitate an MBCT-C group for anxious children. Dr. Freedman co-founded Mindfulness Toronto, a community of mindful health care providers, educators, and other professionals who meet regularly to practice together and support each other in their efforts to integrate mindfulness into their work, and founded Mindfulness Families and Schools, a co-operative group of health care professionals and educators dedicated to bringing mindfulness into the lives of children, teachers, and parents.

Amy Garrett, PhD
Research Scientist Stanford University

Amy Garrett, PhD has used neuroimaging to study adolescent mood and anxiety disorders, including PTSD, bipolar disorder, and depression at the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry. Her goal is to understand how the brain is altered by psychiatric illness in the teen years, as well as the neural mechanisms of recovery from illness. Amy's educational background includes a B.S. in engineering from the University of Illinois, a PhD in Neuroscience from Wake Forest University, and postdoctoral fellowships at UC Davis Department of Psychiatry and Stanford University Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research.

Sam Himelstein, PhD
Psychotherapist, Researcher, and Mindfulness Teacher

Sam Himelstein, PhD is the Executive Director of Engaging The Moment, LLC and provides individual, group, and family psychotherapy to high-risk and incarcerated adolescents at a non-profit organization in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. He is currently the Research Director at the Mind Body Awareness (MBA) Project, where he completed his doctoral dissertation titled, "A Mixed Methods Study of a Mindfulness-Based Intervention with Incarcerated Youth." Dr. Himelstein is adjunct faculty at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and facilitates workshops, trainings, and consultations related to mindfulness, working with at-risk youth, and research in non-profit agencies, government agencies, and academic institutions in the community.

Lorraine M. Hobbs, M.A., CHom., Certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher
Director of Youth and Family Programs
Senior MBSR Teacher
UCSD Center for Mindfulness

Lorraine M. Hobbs, M.S., CHom., received her training at the UCSD Center for Mindfulness under the supervision of Dr. Steve Hickman.  She has served as clinical director of in-patient and residential treatment programs, where she worked extensively with teens and their families.  Her interest in integrative medicine and in the growing research on the consequences of stress and children inspired her to create a six week Stress Reduction for Teens program at the Center for Mindfulness and to collaborate with a colleague in developing a Mindful Parent program.  Her desire to reach a larger population and to teach mindfulness practice as a way of enhancing the learning process encouraged Lorraine to begin working with schools to implement a six-to-eight week mindfulness-based curriculum, where she also teaches mindfulness practices to faculty and staff. Lorraine lectures on the efficacy of MBSR and mindfulness with teens in the community.  She is a certified Iyengar yoga teacher and teaches yoga throughout the city.  She is a homeopathic practitioner and practices part time.

Joe Klein, LPC, CSAC
Founder and President Inward Bound Mindfulness Education

Joe Klein is the founder of Inward Bound Mindfulness Education (iBme) which provides transformative retreats for teens and college students as well as for parents and professionals who work with youth. He has over 20 years' experience working with youth as a teacher, counselor and soccer coach. He is a Licensed Professional Counselor, Certified Substance Abuse Counselor and a long term practitioner of mindfulness meditation, yoga and Chinese internal martial arts.

Mark Lilly
Yoga Therapist and Author
Founder, Street Yoga

For Mark Lilly, yoga is an everyday survival skill, a practice he has shared with thousands of youth as founder and president of Street Yoga, a Portland, OR based non-profit. He still lives with the tremors of traumas past, and realizes the delicate line between suffering and awakening. His teaching emphasizes cultivation of the best within each of us, the authentic stories and experiences that illuminate our being and drive our teaching to places of deep truthfulness. Mark has developed many special yoga curricula in addition to the core and advanced Street Yoga trainings, specialized work for young patients recovering from illness or injury in the hospital, for young people recovering from sexual abuse, and workshops for adults moving through entrenched traumas or grappling with high-intensity communication situations. Through it all, he brings a lightness and love to his teaching that is rooted in humility, grace and joy.

Chris McKenna
Mindfulness Teacher & Executive Director, Mind Body Awareness Project

Chris McKenna is the Executive Director of the Mind Body Awareness Project, an Oakland-based nonprofit that has pioneered the development of mindfulness-based interventions for at-risk youth. He manages the delivery of mindfulness-based rehabilitation programs in six different juvenile detention facilities and two aftercare sites in four different counties in California. In collaboration with Oakland Children's Hospital, he is currently implementing a program which utilizes MBA's curriculum as a formal medical prescription for anxiety and insomnia for youth in the probation system. He is also working with Stanford Medical School to measure the effects of retreat-style mindfulness practice for youth in long-term detention.

Amy Saltzman, MD
Mindfulness Teacher & Holistic Physician
Creator and Director: Still Quiet Place
Co-founder and Director: Association for Mindfulness in Education

Dr. Amy Saltzman is a holistic physician, mindfulness teacher, scientist, wife, mother, and devoted student of transformation. Her passion is supporting people of all ages in enhancing their well being, and discovering the Still Quiet Place within. She is recognized by her peers as a visionary and pioneer in the fields of holistic medicine and mindfulness in K-12 education. Dr. Saltzman is the founder and director of the Association for Mindfulness in Education, and a founding member of the Northern California Advisory Committee on Mindfulness. She has conducted research studies evaluating the benefits of teaching mindfulness to child-parent pairs, and to children in low-income elementary schools. She offers presentations and courses for young children, teens, parents, educators, and health care professionals. Dr. Saltzman also has a private practice in Menlo Park, CA , where she provides holistic medical care and individual mindfulness instruction to children, teens and adults. www.stillquietplace.com

Randye Semple, PhD
Clinical Psychologist and Author
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Anxious Children

Randye J. Semple, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. She teaches and provides clinical supervision to psychiatric residents and psychology graduate students at LAC+USC Medical Center in Los Angeles. She is a licensed clinical psychologist in the states of New York and California; an Associate Editor of the journal "Mindfulness;" and a Past President of the Mindfulness and Acceptance special interest group of the Association for Behavior and Cognitive Therapies. Dr. Semple's research focuses on the development and integration of mindfulness-based interventions for treatment of childhood anxiety. She has presented at national and international conventions and published scientific papers on this topic. She is the co-developer of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Children (MBCT-C), a 12-session psychotherapy for anxious children.

Nimrod Sheinman, ND
Naturopathic physician and mind-body expert
Founder, Israel Center for Mind-Body Medicine
Founder, The Mindful Language Project

Nimrod Sheinman, ND, is one of Israel's leading experts in mind-body, mindfulness and Imagery based therapies. Over the last 25 years he has lead trainings for health professionals in Israel, Australia, Europe, and USA. He is the co-founder of the Israel Center for Mind-Body Medicine and the initiator of the "Sfat HaKeshev Program" (in Hebrew – The Mindful Language). The Mindful Language program integrates mindfulness and mind-body health principles, and during the last 15 years has been taught to over 10,000 kids, teachers, parents and school psychologists. He is a 1985 graduate of the National College of Natural Therapies, Oregon, USA, and a former board member of Bastyr University, Washington, USA. He is the author of "Food for Thought" and "Imagery based Therapy in Clinical Practice" [both in Hebrew].

David Viafora, MSW
Teacher - Teen Program
UCSD Center for Mindfulness