The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds

Katherine Bonus MA, M REd

MBSR Program Manager and Instructor

UW Health Hospital and Clinics

Integrative Medicine

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Katherine completed a Masters degree in Speech Pathology. She began practicing meditation in 1976 and has studied and trained in both Christian and Buddhist contemplative traditions obtaining a second MA in Religious Education. Katherine founded the Mindfulness Program at UW Health in 1993. She completed the professional training program and the teacher developmental intensive program at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Under her supervision, the mindfulness program has collaborated in the study of the impact of meditation on educators, medical students, and people with health and stress concerns. Committed to supporting mindfulness in the practice of medicine, in 2005 the mindfulness program invited collaboration with UW Health Integrative Medicine in the creation of Mindfulness Based Integrative Medicine Retreats (MBMIR) for healthcare staff and all people.

Rahul Garg

Computational Biology Department

IBM T. J. Watson research Center

Yorktown Heights, NY

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Rahul Garg is presently exploring the use of high-performance computing to extract biomarkers from neuroimaging data. He is developing algorithms to characterize brain dynamics from fMRI data using functional connectivity, Granger causality analysis and other machine learning techniques. In addition to fMRI data analysis, he is developing new methods using high-performance computing and machine learning for reconstruction problems arising in PET, SPECT, CT and MRI imaging. His present work is focused on reconstruction for the HRRT (PET) scanner.

Prior to this, he was manager of the Blue Gene system software team at IBM India research lab. His work was focused on improving performance and reliability of massively parallel supercomputers. He has published several papers in reputed international conferences and journals. His work on enhancing the performance of Blue Gene family of supercomputers enabled the Blue Gene installations at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, USA and the Argonne National Lab, USA, to win the prestigious HPC challenge awards for four years in a row (from 2005 to 2008).

He has also worked in the areas of algorithms, operations research, game theory and communication networks. Rahul holds a PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, MS from University of California at Berkeley and B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

In addition to photography and Indian classical music, he is also interested in the use of yoga and meditation to make a difference in the lives of people.

Giulio Tononi, MD, PhD

Professor of Psychiatry

UW-Madison

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Giulio Tononi received his medical degree and specialized in psychiatry at the University of Pisa, Italy. After serving as a medical officer in the Army, he obtained a PhD in neuroscience as a fellow of the Scuola Superiore, based on his work on sleep regulation. From 1990 to 2000 he has been associated with The Neurosciences Institute, first in New York and then in San Diego. He is currently Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is studying consciousness and its disorders as well as the mechanisms and functions of sleep.

In his work on consciousness, Dr. Tononi has addressed the problem of how the activities of functionally specialized areas of the brain can be integrated to give rise to a unified conscious experience. To this end, he has: (1) constructed large-scale computer models based on the anatomy and physiology of the thalamocortical system to study the mechanisms of information integration; (2) developed theoretical approaches aimed at defining and measuring the integration of information within the nervous system; (3) pioneered experimental approaches aimed at characterizing the neural substrate of conscious experience by using neuroimaging and, more recently, transcranial magnetic stimulation. This work has recently led to the formulation of the information integration theory of consciousness. His group is currently investigating some of the predictions of the theory, with particular emphasis on the breakdown of information integration in various stages of sleep and in brain disorders such as schizophrenia.