Michael Sheehy

Michael Sheehy, PhD, is the Director of Programs at the Mind & Life Institute where he leads interdisciplinary dialogues and educational programs in the contemplative sciences. Concurrently, he is faculty in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia where he is affiliated with the Contemplative Sciences Center and Tibet Center. Before joining Mind & Life in 2016, he was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School. He has spent extensive periods conducting field research and working with contemplative communities inside Tibet, including three years training in a Buddhist monastery. His interests abide in Tibetan Buddhism and its philosophical and literary contributions in dialogue with broad issues in the humanities about contemplative experience, consciousness and its transformations, and the Buddhism / science interface. He is a collaborator on a project that examines imagination and visualization in Tibetan first-person life writing and contemplative literatures.