Meet our Advisors

Michelle is the developer of the Compassion for Couples program. 

 

Michelle is a certified teacher of Mindful Self-Compassion, Compassion Cultivation Training, and The Daring Way™ and Rising Strong™ programs and a senior teacher trainer, mentor, and co-founder of the teacher-training program in Mindful Self-Compassion.   She teaches and speaks on the topics of compassion for self and others nationally and internationally. 

 

As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist she maintains a small private practice. 

 

For more information on Michelle’s teaching and schedule please visit her website: WiseCompassion.com

Dr. Johannes Eichstaedt is a Computational Social Scientist in Psychology. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Stanford and a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

 

In 2011, he co-founded a big data psychology lab, the World Well-Being Project. He received his Ph.D. and did a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the social sciences, Johannes did research in particle physics with an M.S. from the University of Chicago.

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Johannes uses Facebook and Twitter to measure the psychological states of large populations and individuals, to determine the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that drive illness, depression, or support well-being. He uses A.I.-based methods to better understand these psychological phenomena, as well as to measure their expression unobtrusively and at scale for large populations. 

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This is especially relevant for the measurement of subjective well-being for populations around the world—in places where no traditional measures are available with sufficient spatial and temporal resolution to measure the impact of economic or social disruptions, or to inform public policy. 

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Real-time measurement of population mental health is becoming particularly critical in the aftermath of COVID-19 (see here for a short presentation). A key emphasis of his computational work is to use these data and algorithms for good, to benefit well-being and health.

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In his non-academic time he practices Tai Chi and goes on long-distance hikes. 

Dr. Fadel Zeidan, PhD is the Associate Research Director at the UCSD Center for Mindfulness and Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at UCSD. 

 

He is currently serves on the Mind and Life Institute Steering Council and the UCSD T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion Executive Council. Fadel has been researching the effects of mindfulness meditation on health for 20 years.

 

He and his laboratory have discovered the neural processes supporting mindfulness meditation and mindfulness-based pain relief. Recently, his team demonstrated that mindfulness meditation is mechanistically distinct from and more effective than placebo, distraction, and relaxation. 

 

His research is currently funded by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, is a five time Francisco J. Varela awardee and has disseminated his findings through traditional media outreach (CNN; NPR; Time Magazine, CBS and others), Tedx and recently personally presented his work to His Holiness, the Dalai Lama in Mongolia.