Julianna received her BA in psychology from Duke University. As founder, president, and head trainer of Unified Mindfulness, she is dedicated to disseminating Shinzen Young’s comprehensive mindfulness meditation system through the creation and presentation of educational programs and teacher-training certification programs.

Julianna is devoted to deepening people’s understanding of research-supported mindfulness and empowering anyone to guide others in its practice. She has been training individuals and groups in the Unified Mindfulness system for nearly two decades. Julianna is also a founding member of Brightmind Meditation, LLC—the developer of the Brightmind mindfulness app.

In addition to her work at Unified Mindfulness and Brightmind Meditation, Julianna creates onsite and online mindfulness trainings for corporate clients through the Flourishing Leadership Institute; delivers keynotes; privately coaches executives, leadership, celebrities, and entrepreneurs; and leads group trainings for company leaders aiming to support preventative health care and improve the work environment through mindfulness meditation. In these roles, she delivers specific mindfulness strategies tailored to the individual’s or company’s needs.

With more than 100 weeks of immersive silent retreat training in both the mindfulness and Zen traditions, Julianna has completed over 12,000 hours of formal practice. Along the way, she has participated in a number of studies, including a study at UCLA comparing long-term meditator's brains with those of non-meditators, and a workplace research study at Carnegie Mellon University carried out under noted mindfulness researcher David Creswell, PhD.

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Dr. McCormick currently serves as director of education at Unified Mindfulness.

In 1975, he received a B.A. in psychology from the University of California Santa Cruz, where he was part of Dr. Elliot Aronson’s research team that examined cooperative approaches to reducing interracial conflict and academic performance problems in newly integrated school, and made Honors in Psychology, College Honors, and Thesis Honors. In 1985, he received a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University.

As a pioneer in the fields of workplace mindfulness, critical management studies, and spirituality in the workplace, Dr. McCormick co-conducted, with Dr. Jeremy Hunter, the first peer-reviewed research on mindfulness in the workplace. He has published more than thirty journal articles and book chapters.

Dr. McCormick began his meditation practice in the early 1970s, studied mindfulness meditation with Stephen Levine in the late 1970s, and began studying mindfulness meditation with Shinzen Young in 1985. He taught in the Ph.D. Program in Organizational Psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology and then joined the liberal studies faculty at Antioch University, where he taught Psychology of Religion. In 1991, he began teaching about mindfulness and continued this pursuit while serving as a professor at the business schools of the University of Redlands and California State University–Northridge.

Dr. McCormick was awarded by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management for his work in the White House Department of Organization Development and the National Institutes of Health. He has been a consultant, researcher, and instructional designer for Mercedes Benz, American Red Cross National Headquarters, Kaiser Permanente, and AIDS Project Los Angeles. As a community organizer, he co-created an activist organization that advocated for psychiatric patients’ rights and was appointed to the Santa Cruz County Mental Health Advisory Board.

Dr. McCormick cares deeply about teaching and has a strong interest in teaching methods that are supported by scientific research. He is particularly excited about using scientifically supported teaching methods in the Unified Mindfulness programs.

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Dr. Creswell serves as a tenured associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the director of the Health & Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University.

In 2000, Dr. Creswell received his bachelor’s degree in psychology, with distinction (cum laude), from Colorado College. He received his master's degree in social psychology in 2003 and his Ph.D. in social psychology—with minors in health psychology, quantitative measurement, and psychometrics—in 2007, both from the University of California (Los Angeles). From 2007 to 2008, Dr. Creswell served as an NIMH Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology (School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles).

Dr. Creswell’s research focuses broadly on understanding what makes people resilient under stress. Specifically, he conducts community intervention studies, laboratory studies of stress and coping, and neuroimaging studies to understand how various stress management strategies alter coping and stress resilience. For example, he is currently working on studies that test how mindfulness meditation training impacts the brain, peripheral-stress physiological responses, and stress-related disease outcomes in at-risk community samples. Dr. Creswell also explores how the use of simple strategies (self-affirmation, rewarding activities, cognitive reappraisal) can buffer stress and improve problem-solving under pressure.

Dr. Creswell has made some recent research forays into other areas, such as in describing the role of unconscious processes in learning and decision making, developing new theory and research on behavioral priming, and building a new field of health neuroscience.

Dr. Creswell's work has been published in general science, health psychology, social psychology, neuroscience, and medical journals. He was recognized in 2011 as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science, and in 2014 received the American Psychological Association Early Career Award for his scientific contributions to psychology.
Dr. Creswell utilizes the Unified Mindfulness system in his research.

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Stella is a psychologist, professor, and Zen practitioner. She became a formal student in 2008 in the Soto Zen tradition. She teaches courses in mindfulness based psychotherapies and the psychology of
compassion at the Union Institute & University. She also co-facilitates a family program and young adult program at Shao Shan Temple, in Woodbury Vermont. Her interests are in the integration of dharma
practice and meditative awareness in the psychotherapeutic relationship and process.

Stella is Chair of the BA program is psychology at the Union Institute & University. She is on the faculty of the Vermont Institute for the Psychotherapies. She maintains a clinical practice in central Vermont.

Dr. Vago serves as the research director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine and the director of the Contemplative Neuroscience and Integrative Medicine (CNIM) Laboratory at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He is an associate professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and the Department of Psychiatry.

Dr. Vago is also a research associate at the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory (FNL), Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Harvard Medical School. He has completed postdoctoral fellowships in neuroimaging and mind-body medicine, as well as the Stuart T. Hauser Research Training Program in Biological and Social Psychiatry. He has previously held the position of senior research coordinator for the Mind & Life Institute and is currently a Mind and Life Fellow, supporting the Mind and Life mission by advising on strategy and programs.

In 1997, Dr. Vago received his bachelor’s degree in brain and cognitive sciences from the University of Rochester. In 2005, he received his PhD in cognitive and neural sciences with a specialization in learning and memory from the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah. Dr. Vago’s research interests broadly focus on utilizing translational models to identify and characterize neurobiological substrates that mediate psychopathology with an aim to better predict outcomes and potential biologically based diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for those suffering with mental illness and chronic pain.

Through mixed research methods of systems biology, neuroimaging, predictive computational modeling, connectomics, genomic and neuroendocrine science, innovation, and cognitive-behavioral and first-person phenomenological analyses, Dr. Vago focuses on one basic question: What are the basic neurobiological and physiological components that constitute adaptive mind-brain-body interactions and their therapeutic relevance in psychiatric settings? He has a number of ongoing research initiatives, including Mapping the Meditative Mind, in which he has partnered with contemporary meditation and yoga teachers as well as scholars to investigate states of meditation across the spectrum of formal meditative expertise. He has also collaborated with Shinzen Young and used the Unified Mindfulness system with significant success in several of these endeavors.

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Dr. Hunter serves as associate professor of practice and is the founding director of the Executive Mind Leadership Institute at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, Claremont Graduate University. He also serves as visiting professor at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, where he developed and co-teaches the Leading Mindfully executive education program.

Dr. Hunter received a BA in East Asian studies from Wittenberg University in 1994, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and received an MPP from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in 1996. In 2001, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (Department of Psychology, Committee on Human Development) under the direction of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of ``Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.``

Dr. Hunter has more than a decade’s experience helping leaders to relentlessly develop themselves while retaining their humanity in the face of monumental change and challenge. His work redefines and enhances productivity by cultivating quality of mind. He created and teaches The Executive Mind, a series of demanding and transformative executive education courses dedicated to Drucker’s assertion “You cannot manage other people unless you manage yourself first.” He also teaches mindfulness for corporate clients in the Executive Education program at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University.

Dr. Hunter's work is deeply informed by more than twenty years of experience with Asian contemplative practices and by the experience of living day-to-day for seventeen years with a potentially terminal illness, and when faced with the need for life-saving surgery having more than a dozen former students come forward as organ donors.

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Dr. Eisendrath serves as chief psychologist and president of the Institute for Dialogue Therapy, P.C., where, as a Jungian analyst, she offers psychotherapy with individuals and couples, psychoanalysis, supervision, and training.

Dr. Eisendrath also serves as clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of the University of Vermont, where she teaches and supervises psychiatric residents; clinical faculty and founding member of the Vermont Institute for the Psychotherapies, where she teaches and supervises mental health professionals; and member of the Special Task Force on Psychoanalysis and Spirituality, Division 39 of the American Psychological Association. She previously served as president of the Vermont Association for Psychoanalytic Studies and clinical supervisor for pre- and post-doctoral interns at the Norwich University Counseling Center.

In 1969, Dr. Eisendrath received an A.B. in English, with distinction (summa cum laude), from Ohio University. She received her M.A. in psychology and mythology in 1974 from Goddard College, her M.S.W. in clinical social work from Washington University in 1977, and her Ph.D. in developmental and counseling psychology in 1980 from Washington University, under the direction of Jane Loevinger, Ph.D.

As a psychologist, Jungian psychoanalyst, and author who teaches and writes directly from her own experience and practice, Dr. Eisendrath has published fifteen books and numerous chapters and articles, and her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Her forthcoming books are ``True Love Ways: Relationship as Psycho-Spiritual Development`` and ``Enlightenment and Idealization: Buddhists and Psychoanalysts Talk About Disillusionment on the Path to Awakening.`` She also hosts the nonprofit Enlightening Conversations Series, which sponsors conferences between Buddhist teachers and prominent psychoanalysts.

Dr. Eisendrath became a Zen student of Roshi Philip Kapleau in 1971, has been a student of Shinzen Young since 1998, and is a mindfulness and dharma teacher in the tradition of Shinzen Young. She says, ``I regard the practices of mindfulness and compassion to be necessary for authentic development in psychotherapy and spiritual practices of any kind.”

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Dr. Spinella has served as professor of psychology at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Stockton University since 1999. His research focuses on neuropsychology, biological psychology, positive psychology, prefrontal systems, self-regulation, executive functions, neuroeconomics, altruism, mindfulness, and Buddhist psychology.

In 1992, Dr. Spinella received a B.A. in psychology from Fairleigh Dickinson University. In 1999, he received a Ph.D. in neuropsychology from the City University of New York Graduate Center and served as a clinical neuropsychology resident at the Center for Head Injuries, JFK Medical Center.

Dr. Spinella discovered meditation at the age of 18, gleaning what he could from the limited books and resources available. Although he had a limited understanding of meditation, he nonetheless had the sense that there was something of great potential there. It wasn’t until he encountered Shinzen Young’s teachings around 2005 that he gained a greater sense of the practice and noticed dramatic changes in himself for the better.

It wasn’t long before his meditation practice and professional training started to intermingle and inform each other. Dr. Spinella has been teaching Shinzen Young’s mindfulness meditation system for nine years to university students and people in the local community. It has been a deep source of satisfaction to guide people in discovering this practice and reaping its benefits.

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