Richard Gere

Richard Gere is internationally known as both a leading film actor and as an involved and dedicated social activist and philanthropist. For more than 25 years, he has used his success and resources to bring attention to a number of important global issues.

Mr. Gere is deeply committed to protecting the human rights of the Tibetan people. In 1987 Mr. Gere became the co-founding chairman of Tibet House in New York. He created and sponsored the International Year of Tibet in 1991, culminating in His Holiness the Dalai Lama's historic visit to New York. Upon leaving Tibet House in 1992, Mr. Gere became involved with the International Campaign for Tibet in Washington, DC and, since 1995, has served as its Board Chairman. To provide information on the Tibetan crisis, he has addressed the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, the U.S. House of Representatives, the European Parliament, and the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva. In 1999, 2003 and 2007, Mr. Gere sponsored visits of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to New York City.

Through both the Gere Foundation and his public charity, Healing the Divide, Mr. Gere continues to be a longtime supporter of other HIV/AIDS, humanitarian aid, human rights, and cultural preservation organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Survival International, among others. Mr. Gere has been a longtime sponsor of amfAR, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and Aids Research Alliance. He hosted the 1992 World AIDS Day event at the United Nations. He has been awarded honors by amfAR, Amnesty International, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, the Harvard AIDS Institute, and the One X One Foundation. He is also the recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award and the prestigious Marian Anderson Award.

Daniel Goleman, Ph.D.

Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist who lectures frequently to professional groups, business audiences, and on college campuses. He received his bachelors degree magna cum laude from Amherst College, where he was an Independent Scholar, and his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. For two years he traveled in India studying Buddhist and other spiritual systems of psychology, the first year as a Harvard Traveling Fellow, the second as a Research Fellow of the Social Science Research Council. He taught at Harvard University before becoming an editor and journalist.

Working as a science journalist, Dr. Goleman reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years. His 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books) was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year-and-a-half; with more than 5 million copies in print worldwide in 30 languages, and has been a best seller in many countries. Goleman’s latest book is Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, was published in 2006. Social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence, can now be understood in terms of recent findings from neuroscience. Dr. Goleman’s book describes the many implications of this new science, including for altruism, parenting, love, health, learning and leadership.

Dr. Goleman has made major contributions to the emerging dialogue between science and spirituality and has been at the forefront of efforts to bring the cultivation of emotional intelligence and inner values into modern education. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was twice nominated for the Pulitzer prize for his science writing in the New York Times.

Matthieu Ricard, Ph.D.

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.

In the past decade, Dr. Ricard has been highly engaged in the scientific study of meditation and in the dialogue between the Tibetan and western scientific traditions. As someone who personally bridges both the western and Tibetan cultural worlds and has attained a high level of knowledge in both the fields of western science and Tibetan Buddhist contemplation, he has played a key role in the emerging dialogue between science and spirituality. He has participated and collaborated in numerous meditation studies as well as high-level dialogues on science and Buddhism with H.H. the Dalai Lama and leading scientists.

Dr. Ricard 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).

Geshe Lobsang Negi, Ph.D.

Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi is Senior Lecturer in Emory University’s Department of Religion. He also serves as Director of the Emory-Tibet Partnership, a multi-dimensional initiative founded in 1998 to bring together the foremost contributions of the Western scholastic tradition and the Tibetan Buddhist sciences of mind and healing. In that capacity, he serves as Co-Director of both the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative and the Emory Collaborative for Contemplative Studies. He is currently working with Emory scientists as contemplative principal investigator on a major clinical research project funded by the NIH that is studying the effects of compassion meditation on the experience of depression, for which he developed the meditation protocol.

Dr. Negi was born in Kinnaur, a small Himalayan kingdom adjoining Tibet. He began his training at The Institute of Buddhist Dialectics and continued his education at Drepung Loseling Monastery in south India, where he received his Geshe Lharampa degree in 1994. He completed his Ph.D. at Emory University in 1999; his interdisciplinary dissertation centered on traditional Buddhist and contemporary Western approaches to emotions and their impact on wellness.

Dr. Negi is the founder and spiritual director of Drepung Loseling Monastery, Inc., a center for Tibetan Buddhist studies, practice, and culture in Atlanta, Georgia, which serves as the North American seat of Drepung Loseling Monastery. He was instrumental in establishing the historic affiliation between Emory University and Drepung Loseling Monastery that was inaugurated by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1998 and that marked the beginning of the Emory-Tibet Partnership.

Special remarks by:

Lodi Gyari Rinpoche

Lodi G. Gyari was born in Nyarong, Eastern Tibet, in 1949, where he received a traditional monastic education. Mr. Gyari and his family fled from Tibet to India in 1959. Realizing that Tibetans need to publicize their struggle to the world he became an editor for the Tibetan Freedom Press and founded the Tibetan Review, the first English language journal published by Tibetans in-exile.

Mr. Gyari was one of the founding members of the Tibetan Youth Congress, an organization of over 10,000 members. He served as President of the Congress in 1975. Mr. Gyari was elected to the Assembly of Tibetan People's Deputies, the Tibetan Parliament in exile, and subsequently became its Chairman. He then served as Deputy Cabinet Minister with responsibilities for the Council for Religious Affairs and the Department of Health. In 1988 he became Senior Cabinet Minister for the Department of Information and International Relations (Foreign Ministry).

Currently he is the Special Envoy of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Mr. Gyari is the lead person designated by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to commence negotiations with the Chinese Government. Mr. Gyari is also the Executive Chairman of the Board of the International Campaign for Tibet, an independent Washington based human rights advocacy group.

Robert A. Paul

Dr. Robert A. Paul is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies and Dean of the Emory College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University. Dean Paul was educated at Harvard College (’63), where his field of concentration was History and Literature, and at the University of Chicago, where he took his M.A. in 1966 and his Ph.D. in 1970 in the field of Cultural Anthropology.

His professional interests within Anthropology include psychological anthropology, comparative religion, myth, and ritual, and the ethnography of Nepal, Tibet, the Himalayas, and South and Central Asia. His extensive scholarly publications in these areas include The Tibetan Symbolic World (University of Chicago Press, 1982) and he served for many years as Editor of ETHOS: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and was President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology from 1992-1994.

In 1998 Dean Paul oversaw the establishment of the Emory-Tibet Partnership, founded upon a vision that Dean Paul and H.H. the Dalai Lama shared for an affiliation that would bring together the best of the western and Tibetan academic traditions for their cross-fertilization and the discovery of new knowledge that would benefit humanity. Dean Paul also worked to coordinate the establishment of the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, a landmark undertaking to develop and implement comprehensive science education for Tibetan monastics.