Clifford Saron, Ph.D., Advisor
Clifford Saron, Ph.D. is currently an Assistant Research Scientist at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California at Davis (http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu), and faculty member in Human Electrophysiology at the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1999 studying interhemispheric visuomotor integration under the direction of Herbert Vaughan, Jr. Dr. Saron has had a long-standing interest in brain and behavioral effects of meditation practice and has been faculty at the Mind and Life Summer Institute for the past three years. In the early 1990s he was centrally involved in a field research project investigating Tibetan Buddhist mind training in collaboration with Jose Cabezón, Richard Davidson, Francisco Varela, Alan Wallace and others under the auspices of the Private Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama and the Mind and Life Institute. Currently, in collaboration with Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace and a consortium of scientists at UC Davis and elsewhere, he is Principal Investigator of The Shamatha Project, a unique longitudinal study of the effects of intensive meditation training based on the practice of meditative quiescence (shamatha) and cultivation of the four immeasureables (loving kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity) on attention-related skills and emotion regulation. The Shamatha Project is the most comprehensive multi-method study to date regarding the potential effects of long-term intensive meditation practice on basic mental and physical processes related to cognition, emotion, and psychological and physiological change. His other primary research interest focuses on investigating brain and behavioral correlates of sensory processing and multisensory integration in children on with autistic spectrum disorders.
The Baumann Foundation
