Brandon King

As an advanced graduate student at the University of California, Davis, I research the immediate and long-term consequences of intensive meditation training on emotional responses to suffering. For 9 years, I have been an integral research member of the Shamatha Project, a longitudinal, wait-list controlled study of 3-months of meditation training in a residential retreat setting. My work—and that of our lab—is informed by a broad view of retreat practice as a holistic intervention that shapes multiple aspects of individuals’ experience, from biological health, to attentional engagement, to purpose in life. I received my undergraduate training at the University of Memphis, where I was involved in research investigating how students’ emotions serve to mediate learning gains in interpersonal contexts. This fostered my ongoing interest in understanding how profiles of emotional responding influence individuals’ ability to enact meaningful behavioral change in their lives.