David E. Presti

David E. Presti, PhD is Teaching Professor of Neurobiology, Psychology, and Cognitive Science in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught for 27 years.  He also worked for more than a decade in the clinical treatment of addiction and post-traumatic stress at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Francisco.  Since 2004, he has been teaching neuroscience to Tibetan monastics in India, as part of a program of science education (Science for Monks) initiated by the Dalai Lama in 2000. In 2016, he co-developed and conducted the first of its kind Buddhism-science workshop with assembled senior monastics in Bhutan. He has doctorates in molecular biology and biophysics from Caltech, and in clinical psychology from the University of Oregon, and is author of Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey (W.W. Norton, 2016).