Dr. Richard J. Davidson

Dr. Richard J. Davidson is the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds. He has been on the faculty since 1984.

He is best known for mapping the emotional brain, and for showing that the qualities we take to be temperament can be trained. Resilience, kindness, a baseline of mood: they have neural signatures, and those signatures can change.

His research looks at the neural bases of emotion and emotional style, and at methods that promote human flourishing, including meditation and related contemplative practices.

The work spans the lifespan, from birth through old age. It includes people with mood and anxiety disorders, autism, and expert practitioners with tens of thousands of hours of practice. Methods include MRI, PET, EEG, and genetic and epigenetic measures. He has published more than 600 scientific papers.

He received his Ph.D. from Harvard and his B.A. from NYU. In 2014 he founded Humin, formerly Healthy Minds Innovations, to turn the science into daily tools, including the free Healthy Minds app he created with Dr. Cortland Dahl.

Time named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2006. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and the National Academy of Medicine in 2017. In 2018 he was appointed to the governing board of UNESCO’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development. He is a longtime friend and confidante of the Dalai Lama, and has served on the World Economic Forum Global Council on Mental Health.

With Cort he co-founded Dharma Lab, the public room for the science and the practice. The letter, the podcast, and the live hours are how they think out loud together.