Panel Speaker Bios:

Keith Holyoak

Dr. Keith Holyoak investigates human thinking and reasoning. After receiving his PhD from Stanford University, he was on the faculty of the University of Michigan and then joined the Department of Psychology at UCLA. Dr. Holyoak has published over 200 scientific articles, and is the author or co-author of several books, including Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning and Discovery, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought, and The Spider’s Thread: Metaphor in Mind, Brain, and Poetry (all from MIT Press). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is currently the Editor of Psychological Review, and serves on the advisory board of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity. Dr. Holyoak has also published several books of poetry.​

Michael Sheehy​

Michael Sheehy is a research assistant professor and director of scholarship at the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia.

Michael Lifshitz

​ I study practices that aim to transform subjective experience—from meditation and hypnosis to placebos, prayer, and psychedelics. I'm particularly interested in how these practices can modulate feelings of agency and ownership, so that inner thoughts and sensations can come to feel as if they are emerging from a source beyond the self. My work combines phenomenology, neuroscience and ethnography to shed light on the plasticity of consciousness.​

I recently started my own research group affiliated with the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University/Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. Previously I did my PhD in Neuroscience at McGill and then worked as a postdoc in the Stanford Department of Anthropology. Before my doctorate, I completed a master's in neuroscience and an undergraduate in psychology, philosophy, and world religions, all at McGill.

Maria Kozhevnikov

Maria Kozhevnikov is an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore and also a Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. Maria Kozhevnikov received her Ph.D. from Technion (Israel) jointly with UC Santa Barbara. Prior to joining the National University of Singapore, she has held faculty positions at Rutgers University (NJ) and George Mason University (VA).  Her research interests focus on examining the neurocognitive bases of creativity and visualization as well as in exploring ways to boost creativity and cognitive capacities through the use of innovative technologies as well as ancient meditative practices.