Michael R. Sheehy, Ph.D., is a Research Associate Professor and the Director of Research at the Contemplative Sciences Center, University of Virginia. He is a meditation researcher whose work translates the transformative dynamics of historical contemplative practices for contemporary contexts. Michael is the founding Principal of the CIRCL, Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab, a transdisciplinary experimental collaboratory that studies contemplation in bodies and minds, cultures and ecologies, our selves and our worlds. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Contemplative Studies (JCS), a peer-reviewed open access journal that publishes original scholarship on contemplation. Housed within the CSC, he co-directs the pan-University AI + Human Flourishing Initiative that investigates the bidirectional loop of the human-AI interface vectored toward flourishing. At UVA, he is core faculty in the Humanistic Cognitive Science Hub (HooCS), an Associate Professor of Religious Studies by courtesy, and a faculty affiliate at the UVA Tibet Center and Buddhist Studies Initiative.

Michael studies how meditation works – specifically, how the generative, dynamic, and ever-evolving processes of contemplation advance our understanding of being human and enhancing life. His research gives attention to historical contemplative practices in dialogue with contemporary discourses in the history of religions, empirical phenomenology, and the cognitive sciences. In the CIRCL lab, the interdisciplinary research team that he supervises investigates contemplative practices and experiences through multiple lenses, including brain-body dynamics, lived experience, and contexts. He is an investigator on several scientific studies, including the Nature of Mind (NOM) Research Project, a longitudinal transdisciplinary study of nondual meditation and consciousness; and ongoing Dream Yoga research with lucid dreamers and Virtual Reality.

For three years, Michael trained with scholars and meditation adepts in a Buddhist monastery in far eastern Tibet, and for twelve years, he worked with monastic communities on the Tibetan plateau to preserve rare manuscripts. Before joining UVA, he directed Mind & Life Dialogues XXXII in Botswana and XXXIII in India with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and scientists. Michael is a lifelong honorary Mind & Life Research Fellow. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School, the Graduate School of Advanced Integrated Studies for Human Survivability at Kyoto University, and Mangalam Research Center in Berkeley. He serves as the co-chair of the Contemplative Studies unit at the American Academy of Religion and board member of the Kyoto Mindfulness Institute.

An author of more than two dozen articles, he has published on topics ranging from models of mind to cognitive illusion and lucid dreaming to mindfulness and nondual meditation. He is coeditor of The Other Emptiness: Rethinking the Zhentong Buddhist Discourse in Tibet (2019), and author of The Jonang: History, Meditation, and Philosophy of a Tantric Buddhist Tradition in Tibet (forthcoming with UVA Press). His current book project on contemplative technologies weaves practices of attention, imagination, and embodiment from historical Tibetan meditation manuals into conversation with cultural psychology and neuroscience. With the University of Virginia Press, he coedits two book series, Varieties of Contemplative Experience and Traditions and Transformations in Tibetan Buddhism. His work has been featured in Psyche magazine, History of Ideas blog, and National Geographic.

Personal website: https://michaelrsheehy.com/

UVA Religious Studies website: https://religiousstudies.as.virginia.edu/michael-sheehy