Well-Being, Immunity & Resilience: Tips for Thriving in the New Normal

Shamini Jain is a scientist, psychologist, and social entrepreneur. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego, and the Founder and CEO of the Consciousness and Healing Initiative (CHI), a nonprofit collaborative accelerator that connects scientists, health practitioners, innovators, and social entrepreneurs to forward the science and practice of healing. CHI was formed through Dr. Jain’s deep desire to bring key stakeholders together to create a coherent and effective movement to move us beyond models of “disease thinking” into the study of whole-person healing for personal and societal empowerment.

Cassandra Vieten is Executive Director of the John W. Brick Foundation, Scholar-in-Residence at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where she served as President from 2013-2019. Her research has focused on spirituality and health, transformative experiences and practices, the development of mindfulness-based interventions for emotional well-being, and development of media technologies to inspire awe. She received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and completed her research training in behavioral genetics at UC San Francisco. She has authored three books, published numerous articles in scientific journals, and is an internationally recognized keynote speaker and workshop leader.

Paul J. Mills is Professor and Chief at the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) Department of Family Medicine and Public Health and Director of the UCSD Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health. In the 1980s he published some of the earliest scientific research on meditation. His work has been featured in Time Magazine, The New York Times, National Public Radio, US News and World Reports, Consumer Reports, The Huffington Post, Gaia TV, and WebMD, among others. He has presented his work at hundreds of conferences and workshops around the world, including at the United Nations. His current Integrative Medicine work focuses on better defining what is meant by the “whole person” and addressing the need to incorporate the transcendent aspects of human awareness, consciousness itself, back into medicine in order to truly understand the whole person and achieve optimal wellbeing. He is currently Director of Research for the Deepak Chopra Foundation, with a focus on meditation and yoga within the context of Traditional Medical Systems.

Dr. Tabatha Parker is a naturopathic physician who currently serves at the Academy of Integrative Health & Medicine (AIHM) as the Executive Director. She previously served as the Associate Fellowship Director and Education Director. Parker’s commitment to collaboration and the underserved makes her uniquely qualified to lead the largest interprofessional integrative health association. “My goal is to bring the integrative community together to find ways to bring integrative health to all. Right now we are doing that by educating the future leaders and clinicians – but there is so much more we can and will do.”