Clifford Saron, Principal Investigator
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Cliff is a Research Scientist at the Center for Mind and Brain and MIND Institute at the University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1999. Dr. Saron has had a long-standing interest in the effects of contemplative practice on physiology and behavior. In the early 1990s he conducted field research investigating Tibetan Buddhist mind training under the auspices of the Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama. A faculty member at Mind and Life Summer Research Institutes in the US and Europe and a former member of the Mind and Life Institute Program and Research as well as Steering Councils, he received the inaugural Mind and Life Service Award in 2018. Dr. Saron directs the Shamatha Project, a multidisciplinary longitudinal investigation of the effects of intensive meditation on physiological and psychological processes central to well-being. In 2012, Dr. Saron and his research team were awarded the inaugural Templeton Prize Research Grant in honor of H.H. the Dalai Lama. Currently his research team is investigating how meditation experience may mitigate the effects of the pandemic on chronic stress and cellular aging, as well as examining consequences of compassion vs. mindfulness training on engagement with suffering. His second research area concerns sensory processing and multisensory integration in children with autism spectrum development. In collaboration with colleagues at the CMB and MIND Institute these studies use sensitive behavioral measures, eye tracking, and dense channel array event-related potentials to investigate possible deficits in these low-level processes which likely contribute to the complex phenotype of autism.
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Brandon King, Post-Doctoral Scholar
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Brandon is a postdoctoral research scholar studying the effects of meditation training on empathy and emotional engagement with suffering. He is interested in how meditation training might shift motivational engagement with others’ suffering, as a possible antecedent for compassionate responding. In his dissertation research (also completed in the Saron Lab), Brandon employed measures of peripheral physiology and memory to examine the effects of a 3-month intensive meditation retreat on practitioners' emotional responses to suffering in others.
Brandon currently co-leads the Pathways Project—a study of how different contemplative training styles influence engagement with emotional stimuli depicting threats or harm to self and others. For this, he led the development of a novel stimulus set, informed by his work on his dissertation, that allows researchers to disambiguate responses to different classes of emotionally challenging stimuli. More broadly, he is interested in different approaches to meditation training and the role of intensive meditation retreats in contemplative practice. He hopes to understand and characterize what motivates people to meditate, how practitioners balance daily practice with more intensive forms of practice, and how the benefits of intensive practice are consolidated or integrated into everyday life. Education: BA in Psychology, University of Memphis; MA and PhD in Psychology, UC Davis |
Alea Corin Skwara, Post-Doctoral Scholar (she/her)
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Alea is a doctoral candidate in the Perception, Cognition, and Cognitive Neuroscience (PCCN) area of the Psychology Department at UC Davis. Her research centers on compassion and responses to suffering, and how contemplative training may support adaptive engagement with suffering.
To this end, Alea’s work brings together a variety of methodological approaches--including brain electrophysiology, peripheral nervous system activity, eyetracking, and self-report and behavioral measures--to better understand how individuals respond to suffering, and how meditation training may relate to the development of compassion for oneself and for others. Her dissertation explores brain activity during compassion meditation to ask whether there is neural evidence that, with practice, we can expand the boundaries of those for whom we experience care and concern (watch Alea’s 3 minute Grad Slam Competition talk about this work here). Alea also co-leads the Pathways Project with PI Cliff Saron and postdoc Brandon King, which explores the effects of different contemplative trainings on experiential, attentional, and physiological engagement with emotional stimuli. In addition to her work in the Saron Lab, Alea has sought out opportunities to apply this work in, and learn from, real-world contexts. This includes a current collaboration with Prof. Raquel Aldana at UC Davis School of Law that brings together legal and mental health academic faculty, and clinical practitioners working with immigrants and trauma to improve how immigration forensic assessments are conducted (read more about this work here). As a whole, Alea hopes her work will contribute to our collective understanding of the psychological and societal factors that support compassionate responses to suffering, and how these may be applied to build a more just and equitable world. Education: BA in Theater, Davidson College; MA in Psychology, UC Davis; PhD in Psychology, UC Davis
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Current Collaborators
Quinn Conklin
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Quinn is a freelance researcher and science writer. She completed her PhD and worked as a postdoctoral scholar in the Saron Lab at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, and then went on to serve as the Executive Director of the Stress Measurement Network at UC San Francisco. Her research explores relationships between psychological wellbeing, social interaction, and biology. She is interested in the biological and relational consequences of adversity and trauma, and the use of contemplative practices to facilitate healing. Quinn’s dissertation investigated the effects of a month-long, silent, residential, Insight Meditation retreat on biomarkers of stress, inflammation, cellular aging, and social affiliation. By elucidating the effects of intensive meditation on these biomarkers, she hopes to better understand the health-related consequences of long-term meditation practice, and their relation to individual differences in psychological well-being. Quinn is also the co-principal investigator of the Contemplative Coping during COVID-19 project. In this project, our goal is to understand how people made use of meditation practices to support stress coping during this unprecedented period of global uncertainty, and how these practice affected mental health and biological aging outcomes.
Education: BS in Biology, Norwich University; MA in Psychology, UC Davis; PhD in Psychology, UC Davis
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Savannah Vandenbos
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Savannah has been a Junior Specialist in the Saron Lab and a Clinical Supervisor at a suicide prevention crisis line. Her curiosity about meditation as a potential mechanism for improving well-being led her to join the Saron Lab in 2017. She has since worked on a variety of projects, including the CCC Study exploring the role of contemplative practices in stress coping during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the Pathways Study investigating the effects of contemplative training programs on emotional responses. She is most interested in the clinical implications of meditation research, especially with respect to how mindfulness practices might be integrated into the treatment and prevention of disordered eating, self-injury, and suicide ideation. In the future, she plans to pursue graduate studies in counseling psychology.
Education: BS in Nutrition Science, minor in Psychology, UC Davis |
Anthony Zanesco, PhD
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The primary focus of my research is to investigate the mental training of sustained attention and the long-term cognitive consequences of meditation practice. To this aim, I have been principally involved in several large longitudinal studies of intensive meditation practice from which I have published in the domains of sustained attention, response inhibition, and mind wandering using behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG) methodologies. Other aspects of my research involve meditation-state related brain activity using EEG, emotional responsivity and compassion using FACS (Facial Action Coding System) and psychophysiology, and investigations of health and stress-related biological markers in meditation practitioners.
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Jennifer Pokorny, PhD
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Jen is a freelance data scientist collaborating with Dr. Clifford Saron on the Shamatha Project, a longitudinal, multidisciplinary project examining the effects of intensive meditation practice. Her research in collaboration with Dr. Saron has focused on developing novel methods to quantify qualitative data using graph theory and network analysis, and on examining the physiological and affective effects of meditation training. She also collaborates with Dr. Saron and Quinn Conklin on the Contemplative Coping during Covid-19 (CCC) project, a study assessing how people are engaging with contemplative communities and practices to cope with stress during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jen has a diverse background in fields including anthropology, systems neuroscience, animal behavior, and developmental cognitive neuroscience, all of which allowed her to develop and refine the data analytic and visualization skills she now uses as a data scientist. She obtained her PhD in Psychology from Emory University, working with renowned primatologist Dr. Frans de Waal while investigating face recognition in capuchin monkeys. In 2012, they received the Ig Nobel Prize in Anatomy for demonstrating that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees from seeing photos of their behinds. For postdoctoral training, she participated in the Autism Research Training Program at the UC Davis MIND Institute, conducting fMRI studies of children and adolescents with autism. Jen is also Chief Programs Officer for Think Elephants International, a 501(c)3 non-profit that works to conserve Asian elephants through research of elephant cognition and the implementation of conservation education programs in the US and Thailand. |
Erika Rosenberg, Ph.D
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Erika Rosenberg, Ph.D. is an affective scientist and expert in the measurement of facial expressions of emotion. She’s also a long time meditation teacher. These worlds come together in her work as an investigator on the Shamatha Project here in the Saron lab at UC Davis, as well as in her teaching, research, and mentorship at The Compassion Institute (a non-profit), and the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University.
Compassion Institute: https://www.compassioninstitute.com/founding-faculty CCARE: http://ccare.stanford.edu/education/cct-staff/ |
Rosanna De Meo, PhD
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During my PhD I studied adult auditory semantic processing. The main topic of my thesis was to understand how environmental sounds become meaningful using the electroencephalography (EEG) technique. My work in the Saron Lab is on the analysis of sensory processing and integration in typically developing children and those on the autism spectrum.
My research focuses on how the brain creates meaningful concepts or representations from sensory stimuli that in turn enable us to perceive our environment as a comprehensible whole. It is known that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) present unusual responses to sensory inputs (typically either hyper- or hypo-responsiveness), and may have difficulties in binding together information arriving simultaneously from different sensory modalities. Additionally, it is known that the severity and expression of the impairments characteristic of ASD are highly variable from one individual to another. The investigation and definition of brain responses to simple sensory stimulations in ASD, and their relation to neuropsychological profiles, can enable a more complete understanding of how these children perceive their world. I am involved in two projects and collaborate with other research groups at the CMB (notably Dr. Susan Rivera) and at the MIND Institute. The first project aims at investigating altered auditory processing in toddlers with ASD and age-matched typically developing children as part of the MIND Institute Autism Phenome Project. The second project aims at investigating deficits in multisensory associations in early adolescents with ASD and age-matched typically developing teenagers. Education: BS in Psychology (2009), University of Lausanne, Switzerland: MS in Neuroscience (2011), University of Geneva, Switzerland; PhD in Neuroscience (2015), University of Lausanne, Switzerland |
Patrick Dwyer, PhD
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I am a psychology graduate student and my research is connected with my broader interest in helping to ensure that autistic and neurodivergent people can thrive in our society. Autistic people often have sensory sensitivities or other unusual sensory processing patterns that may be a central part of the autistic phenotype and that do appear to be related to quality of life. I am using electrophysiology and other methods to explore heterogeneity in, habituation of, and cross-modal integration of sensory responses in autism. In the future, I hope to study how attention might affect these sensory responses. If you are interested in my thoughts on autism and atypical neurodevelopment, I also have a blog, autisticscholar.com.
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