Mindfulness Science & Practice Community

Who are we?

We are a group of individuals interested in exploring mindfulness through scholarship, research, application and personal practice to help foster wellbeing for all.

We come from various departments across the School of Medicine and the Danforth Campus at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as from a few institutions outside the university. From medicine, public health, philosophy, performing arts, cognitive neuroscience, organizational effectiveness, education and more, we are inherently transdisciplinary.

Origins

Our organization began in 2019 when one of our founders, Dr. Diana Parra Perez, went in search of others who share these interests. Today, we are a community of more than 30 members and growing.

We began as a working group, with funding from CRE2, Wash U’s Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity, which also helped launch our Mindfulness & Anti-Racism Speaker Series. In 2022, we became the Mindfulness Science & Practice Cluster as part of Arts & Science’s Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures with seed funding through mid-2025.

Working Group

We gather virtually twice a month as a working group to meditate and advance progress on projects such as mindfulness week, future speakers, potential collaborations and group gatherings, including retreats.

upcoming working group meetings

Journal Club

Through our Journal Club, we read and discuss articles from academic journals so we can take a broad and critical look at mindfulness from a variety of perspectives. Journal Club is on hiatus for the summer, but will be back for the Fall semester.

Upcoming Journal Club Meetings

Join Our Community

If you’d like to join our working group or journal club, we’d love to have you. Before attending, please use this intro form and tell us a bit about you. We look forward to seeing you at one of our meetings soon!

Mindfulness Info Form

Our Members

We are transdisciplinary with members from business, cognitive science, medicine, public health, education, social work and the arts, including practitioners, teachers scholars and researchers. We welcome Wash U students, faculty and staff as well as those outside of the university interested in personal and/or professional exploration of mindfulness.

meet our members

Mindfulness Retreats

For our Fall 2023 retreat, we gathered at this beautiful Chan (Chinese) Buddhist center in Missouri wine country near Augusta, about an hour from Wash U, for a day of meditation, a shared meal and conversation about the role of mindfulness in science.

Our Winter 2022 retreat was held at the Tyson Research Center, the 2,000-acre environmental field station for Wash U, to celebrate our third anniversary with meditation and a strategy session.