Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a psychologist, Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and New York Times best-selling author. His seven books have been published in 31 languages and include Making Great Relationships, Neurodharma, Resilient, Hardwiring Happiness, Just One Thing, Buddha’s Brain, and Mother Nurture – with over a million copies in English alone. He's the founder of the Global Compassion Coalition and the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, as well as the co-host of the Being Well podcast—which has been downloaded over 10 million times. His free newsletters have 250,000 subscribers, and his online programs have scholarships available for those with financial needs. He’s lectured at NASA, Google, Oxford, and Harvard. An expert on positive neuroplasticity, his work has been featured on CBS, NPR, the BBC, and other major media. He began meditating in 1974 and has taught in meditation centers worldwide. He and his wife live in northern California and have two adult children. He loves the wilderness and taking a break from emails.

Prof. Dr. Tania Singer is a social neuroscientist and psychologist heading the Social Neuroscience Lab of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. She is a world expert on empathy and compassion and has a passion for creating bridges between fields that typically never interact such as linking neuroscience with economics, science with arts or science with spirituality. She has initiated and headed one of the largest meditation-based secular mental training studies on compassion, the ReSource project to study on the effects of meditation on brain, behavior and mental health. Linking such findings to the field of (neuro)economics, she developed a Caring Economics approach, developing new models of economy based on care and social cohesion. Lately, in the CovSocial project she tested the effect of short mental online training on mental health and resilience during the Covid19 pandemic. One of her main aims is to help to translate this scientific knowledge into different arms of society to provide the basis for deep inner change for larger societal change.

James is a Lecturer and Clinical Psychologist and Co-Director of the Compassionate Mind Research Group at the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland. He has a broad research interests in compassion, however, specific research areas include: a) examining compassion focused therapy; b) examining compassion with children; c) what fears, blocks, & resistances people have towards compassion; & d) developing and evaluating compassion interventions. James also holds an Visiting Fellowship at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University and is an Honorary Member of the Compassionate Mind Foundation UK.