Ernst Fehr is Professor in Microeconomics and Experimental Economics and Director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zürich. He is affiliated faculty member of the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), former president of the Economic Science Association and the European Economic Association, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and John Kenneth Galbraith Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. 

Ernst Fehr is well-known for his important contributions to behavioral and experimental economics, as well as to the emerging field of neuroeconomics.  His research focuses on the proximate patterns and the evolutionary origins of human altruism and the interplay between social preferences, social norms and strategic interactions. He has conducted extensive research on the impact of social preferences on competition, cooperation and on the psychological foundations of incentives.  More recently he has worked on the role of bounded rationality in strategic interactions and on the neurobiological foundations of social and economic behavior. 

Fehr’s work is characterized by the combination of game theoretic tools with experimental methods and the use of insights from economics, social psychology, sociology, biology and neuroscience for a better understanding of human social behavior.  In particular his research on the integration of sociological and psychological aspects into modern economics has brought him numerous prizes, such as the Marcel Benoist-Prize 2008.  He is the first economist, who has been honored with this academic prize, referred to as the “Swiss Nobel prize.”

Bill Harbaugh is a professor of economics at the University of Oregon who studies why people make charitable donations. His work uses methods ranging from economic theory to experiments to fMRI neuroimaging. The neuroimaging research (joint with Dan Burghart and the psychologist Ulrich Mayr) shows that people exhibit a “pure altruism” response in reward-related areas of the brain when they see money going to a charity that provides food to the poor, and that those people with larger neural responses are more likely to make charitable donations. He also shows that there is also a warm glow from giving – people show more activation in reward areas when they choose to give the money voluntarily. 

In other work he has modeled the “prestige motive” for charitable giving and shown its effects empirically - when gifts are reported in categories, people tend to give the least amount possible for a given level of recognition. Harbaugh was also among the first economists to use experiments to test how well economic models of rational, self-interested choice apply to the behavior of children. He says, with some purposeful ambiguity, that “economic models work about as well for kids as they do for adults”. 

His most recent project, with Mayr and Jim Andreoni, looks at the receiving side of giving, and is motivated by the saying “Charity is a mixed blessing.” This work – still in progress – uses fMRI to examine the effects of charity on the brains of the people who receive it, with the goal of helping altruists reduce the “mixed” part of the blessing.

Richard Layard is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where he was until 2003 the founder-director of the Centre for Economic Performance.  He now heads the Centre’s Programme on Well-Being.  Since 2000 he has been a member of the House of Lords.

His book Happiness – Lessons from a New Science was published in March 2005 and appears in 20 languages.  Since then he has been heavily involved in promoting the government’s programme of Improved Access to Psychological Therapy.  He is also joint-coordinator of the Local Well-Being Programme through which three local authorities have introduced the Penn Resilience Programme into the curriculum for their 11-year-olds.

Richard Layard was an active member of The Children’s Society Inquiry into The Good Childhood and was co-author of its recent report: A Good Childhood – Searching for Values in a Competitive Age, Penguin (Feb 2009)

He has worked on unemployment, inflation, education, inequality, and post-Communist reform. He was an early advocate of the welfare-to-work approach to European unemployment, and co-authored Unemployment: Macroeconomic Performance and the Labour Market (OUP 1991, 2nd ed 2005) which has influenced policy in many countries.

Dan Batson is an experimental social psychologist.  He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton University in 1972, was a member of the Department of Psychology at the University of Kansas from 1972-2008, and is now a Professor Emeritus there.  He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he has a courtesy appointment as an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee and continues to write and collaborate on research.  Over the years, his research has focused primarily on the existence of altruistic motivation and on its antecedents (including empathic concern, perspective taking, and parental nurturance) and its consequences.  He has also conducted research on the behavioral consequences of religion and on the nature of moral motivation and moral emotions.

Tania Singer received her Ph.D. in psychology from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2000 and was awarded the prestigious Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society for best dissertation of that year. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, until 2002.  Tania conducted research on the neural foundations of empathy and fairness in healthy and autistic subjects at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, London, from 2002-2005 and at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, from 2005-2006.  Currently at the University of Zurich, she is Inaugural Chair of Social Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics and Co-Director of the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research.  She has published papers on the social brain in Science, Nature, etc., and is Advisory Board Member of the Society for Neuroeconomics.  Using a multi-method and interdisciplinary approach combining theories, paradigms, and techniques from disciplines as varied as neuroscience (e.g., functional and structural MRI, rt-fMRI, TMS, EEG), developmental and social psychology (e.g., questionnaires, experience-sampling methods), psychobiology (e.g., hormonal and autonomic measures), and economics (e.g., game theoretic paradigms), she investigates the foundations of human social behavior and, more specifically, the developmental, neural, and hormonal mechanisms underlying social cognition; social and moral emotions such as empathy, compassion, envy, revenge, and fairness; and emotion-regulation capacities and their role in social decision making and cooperation.

Richard J. Davidson is the William James and Vilas Research Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, Director of the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience and the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Psychology and has been at Wisconsin since 1984.  He has published more than 250 articles, many chapters and reviews and edited 13 books. He has been a member of the Mind and Life Institute’s Board of Directors since 1991. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his research including a National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Award, a MERIT Award from NIMH, an Established Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders (NARSAD), a Distinguished Investigator Award from NARSAD, the William James Fellow Award from the American Psychological Society, and the Hilldale Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He was the Founding Co-Editor of the new American Psychological Association journal EMOTION and is Past-President of the Society for Research in Psychopathology and of the Society for Psychophysiological Research. He was the year 2000 recipient of the most distinguished award for science given by the American Psychological Association –the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.  In 2003 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2004 he was elected to the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.  He was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine in 2006.  In 2006 he was also awarded the first Mani Bhaumik Award by UCLA for advancing the understanding of the brain and conscious mind in healing. Madison Magazine named him Person of the Year in 2007. 

Tenzin Gyatso, the XIV Dalai Lama, is the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, thehead of the Tibetan government-in-exile, and a spiritual leader revered worldwide. He was born on July 6, 1935 in a small village called Taktser in northeastern Tibet. Born to a peasant family, he was recognized at the age of two, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the reincarnation of his predecessor, the XIIIth Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas are manifestations of the Buddha of Compassion, who choose to reincarnate for the purpose of serving human beings.Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, he is universally respected as a spokesman for the compassionate and peaceful resolution of human conflict. He has traveled extensively, speaking on subjects including universal responsibility, love, compassion and kindness. Less well known is his intense personal interest in the sciences; he has said that if he were not a monk, he would have liked to be an engineer. As a youth in Lhasa it was he who was called on to fix broken machinery in the Potola Palace, be it a clock or a car. He has a vigorous interest in learning the newest developments in science, and brings to bear both a voice for the humanistic implications of the findings, and a high degree of intuitive methodological sophistication.

Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk at Shechen Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. Born in France in 1946, he received a Ph.D. in Cellular Genetics at the Institut Pasteur under Nobel Laureate Francois Jacob. As a hobby, he wrote Animal Migrations (Hill and Wang, 1969). He first traveled to the Himalayas in 1967 and has lived there since 1972, studying with Kangyur Rinpoche and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, two of the most eminent Tibetan teachers of our times. Since 1989, he served as French interpreter for His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

He is the author of The Monk and the Philosopher (with his father, the French thinker Jean-Francois Revel), of The Quantum and the Lotus (with the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan), and of Happiness, A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill. He has translated several books from Tibetan into English and French, including The Life of Shabkar and The Heart of Compassion. As a photographer, he has published several albums, including The Spirit of Tibet, Buddhist Himalayas, Tibet, Motionless Journey and Bhutan (www.matthieuricard.org). He devotes all the of proceeds from his books and much of his time to forty humanitarian projects (schools, clinics, orphanages, elderly people's home and bridges) in Tibet, Nepal and India, through his charitable association Karuna-shechen (www.karuna-shechen.org) and to the preservation of the Tibetan cultural heritage (www.shechen.org).

Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD, is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and author. She is Founder, Co-abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center, a Buddhist monastery in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Director of the Upaya Institute. She received her Ph.D in medical anthropology in 1973. She has lectured on the subject of death and dying at many academic institutions, including Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Medical School, Georgetown Medical School, University of Virginia Medical School, Duke University Medical School, University of Connecticut Medical School, among many others. She received a National Science Foundation Fellowship in Visual Anthropology, and was an Honorary Research Fellow in Medical Ethnobotany at Harvard University, and is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow and Kluge Scholar at the Library of Congress. From 1972-1975, she worked with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center on pioneering work with dying cancer patients. She has continued to work with dying people and their families and to teach health care professionals as well as lay individuals on contemplative care of the dying. Her work for forty years has focused on engaged and applied Buddhism. She is a Board Member of the Mind and Life Institute. The author of many books, including "Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death," Dr. Halifax founded the Project on Being with Dying and the Upaya Prison Project.

John Dunne is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Emory University, where he is Co-Director of the Encyclopedia of Contemplative Practices and the Emory Collaborative for Contemplative Studies. He was educated at the Amherst College and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. from the Committee on the Study of Religion in 1999. Before joining Emory's faculty in 2005, he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and held a research position at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Support from the American Institute of Indian Studies sustained two years of his doctoral research at the Central Institute for Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, India. 

His work focuses on various aspects of Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice. In Foundations of Dharmakirti's Philosophy (2004), he examines the most prominent Buddhist theories of perception, language, inference and justification. His current research includes an inquiry into the notion of "mindfulness" in both classical Buddhist and contemporary contexts, and he is also engaged in a study of Candrakirti's "Prasannapada", a major Buddhist philosophical work on the metaphysics of "Emptiness." His recently published work includes an essay on neuroscience and meditation co-authored with Richard J. Davidson and Antoine Lutz. He frequently serves as a translator for Tibetan scholars, and as a consultant, he has assisted Drs. Davidson and Lutz in their neuropsychological studies of Tibetan contemplative practices.

Born on May 12th 1959 in Aachen, Gert Scobel studied Theology and Philosophy in Frankfurt am Main und at the GTU in Berkeley, California, receiving a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. After a short period of teaching in collaboration with a German Research Project at the University of San Francisco, he worked as a writer for the magazine of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung until he joined the ARD (First public National Radio and TV) in 1988 as documentary filmmaker and host of various science and culture programs. He was anchorman of the daily culture program Kulturzeit (3sat) and of the nationwide Breakfast TV both on ARD and ZDF in 2004. Creating several TV formats, he presently is responsible for his own program „scobel“ on 3sat in 2008. In an interdisciplinary way, the weekly TV program covers themes ranging from science and culture to social issues. He received varios awards (Deutscher Fernsehpreis, Grimme Preis, Bayerischer Fernsehpreis), is author of two children books and of a fact book on wisdom (Weisheit – über das was uns fehlt, 2008). He received two times the EICOS (The European Initiative for Communicators of Science) scholarship working at the Max-Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried and the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen.

Mr. Sanjit (Bunker) Roy is a well-known Indian educator and social activist who has done development and empowerment work in some of the least developed countries of the world. He received his education at the prestigious Doon School and St. Stephens College.  In 1972, he founded the innovative Barefoot College in India (www.barefootcollege.org). The college was founded upon the idea that traditional and indigenous knowledge and skills that lie within the community should be applied to finding solutions to rural problems. The college believes in practicing the life style and work style of Mahatma Ghandi.  This innovative educational Barefoot approach has now spread to 13 States in India including Bhutan and to 17 of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) around the world, mostly in Africa. 

Mr. Roy has also been involved in environmental activism and has received numerous awards for his work in the areas of education and ecology, including: the SUEZ Environment-Water for All Foundation-Special Prize (2009); The Sierra Club Green Energy & Green livelihoods Achievement Award (2009); the Alcan Award (2006); the Skoll Foundation Award (2005); and The Schwab Foundation for Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs, World Economic Forum Geneva Switzerland (2002) among others. In 2008, The Guardian in London recognized Mr. Bunker Roy as one of the 50 Environmentalists in the world who could save the planet.

Bill George is a Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School, where he is teaching leadership and leadership development, and is the Henry B. Arthur Fellow of Ethics. He is the author of the best-selling books True North, Discover Your Authentic Leadership and Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets of Creating Lasting Value. Bill currently serves on the boards of ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs.  He is the former Chairman and CEO of Medtronic. Under his leadership, Medtronic’s market capitalization grew from $1.1 billion to $60 billion, averaging a 35% increase each year. Mr. George has made frequent appearances on television and radio, and his articles have appeared in numerous publications. He has been named one of “Top 25 Business Leaders of the Past 25 Years” by PBS.

Antoinette Hunziker-Ebneter is CEO and Founding Partner of Forma Futura Invest Inc., an independent asset management company for private and institutional clients focusing on sustainable quality of life. Forma Futura invests in attractive investment opportunities incorporating good governance and social and environmental responsibility while reflecting the client's values.

Prior to her present engagement, Antoinette Hunziker-Ebneter was responsible for Trading and Sales and Member of the Group Executive Board of the Bank Julius Baer & Co. She was previously Head of the Swiss Stock Exchange and Chief Executive Officer of virt-x, the first pan-European stock exchange with headquarters in London. In the mid-1990s she was responsible for building up and commissioning the Swiss Electronic Exchange (EBS). She began her professional career as a currency options trader at Citibank. She went on to develop SOFFEX trading at Bank Leu, where she was later appointed Head of Securities Trading and Sales.

Antoinette Hunziker-Ebneter is Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of BKW FMB Energy Ltd. and a member of the Board of Directors of the Buildings Insurance of Bern. She holds a Master of Arts in Business and Administration from the University of St. Gallen and a Diploma from the Swiss Banking School.

Dr. Arthur Vayloyan is a member of the Private Banking Management Committee of Credit Suisse and Head of Investment Services and Products. He has the responsibility for integrating and delivering Credit Suisse’s range of innovative products and services – including investment research and sales support – to the Private Banking units around the globe. His responsibilities also include the Center of Competence for Ultra High Net Worth Clients, External Asset Managers and Trust and Life Insurance solutions.

In addition to his functional responsibilities, Arthur Vayloyan serves in various committees and boards, both within and outside Credit Suisse. 

Dr. Vayloyan joined Credit Suisse in 1992, led the Representative Office in Uruguay until 1996, and subsequently, the Latin America/Iberia desk, which also included the offshore businesses from North America. From 2002 until the end of 2005, he was the Head of Private Banking Switzerland, covering the Swiss, as well as most offshore markets.

An avid speaker and author, Arthur Vayloyan’s engagements include discourses on issues and topics ranging from Nanotechnology to Innovation, Globalization and Microfinance. He was an invited speaker at the United Nations in New York during the Year of Microcredit, 2005. Some of the innovations that he led in private banking received commendations from global media, including the Euromoney, Die Welt (Germany) and Bilanz (Switzerland) magazines.

Arthur Vayloyan is a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry, with special emphasis on Nanotechnology, from the University of Bern (Switzerland) and received his MBA from INSEAD (France) in 1995.

Arthur lives near Zurich, Switzerland with his wife and a son. 

Joan Silk is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is principally interested in how natural selection shapes the evolution of social behavior in nonhuman primates. Most of her empirical work has focused on the behavior and reproductive strategies of females in two species of Old World monkeys, bonnet macaques (Macaca radiata) and baboons (Papio cynocephalus). Her dissertation research on bonnet macaques provided some of the first systematic evidence of the sources of variation in female reproductive success, and revealed that females compete vigorously for reproductive opportunities within the groups. Social bonds and alliances among females provide one way for females to cope with competition and stress. Prof. Silk’s collaborative research on wild baboons in the Amboseli basin of Kenya and the Okvango Delta of Botswana has shown that females form strong, equitable, and enduring relationships with selected partners, and show strong preferences for their mothers, daughters, sisters, and peers. In these groups, the quality of social relationships among females have important effects on their fitness. Females who are well-integrated into their social groups and form the strongest bonds to other females reproduce more successfully than other females.

Over the last decade, Prof. Silk has become increasingly interested in questions that explicitly link together studies of nonhuman primates and humans, attempting to probe the phylogenetic roots of capacities that play a crucial role in human societies, such as reconciliation, cooperation, friendship, cooperative signals, paternal investment, and prosocial sentiments. She has conducted experiments to examine the prosocial preferences of chimpanzees and children.

Prof. Silk is the co-author with Robert Boyd of a well-regarded textbook on human evolution,  How Humans Evolved, the  co-editor (with Peter Kappeler) of a volume about the roots of universal features of human societies, Mind the Gap: The Origins of Human Universals;  and over 100 articles in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals.  

Diego Hangartner, Pharm, M.D., COO Mind and Life; Director of International Operations, Mind and Life Institute, completed his studies in pharmacology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, specializing in psychotherapeutic and psychoactive substances. Having worked with drug addiction, he became interested in understanding the workings of mind and consciousness. After encountering Buddhism, he then spent 11 years in Dharamsala, India, where he first learned Tibetan and then studied for 7 years at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics. During those years, he did several retreats and worked as a translator and interpreter, translating Tibetan into English, German, French and Spanish. After returning to Europe in 2003, he taught widely, was General Secretary and project manager of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s visits in Switzerland 2005 and in Hamburg 2007. He has been associated with Mind and Life since the late 1990's. Presently, he is the General Secretary of Mind and Life International, based in Zurich, Switzerland, and is Mind and Life Chief Operating Officer and Director of Program, Research and International.