Dr. Helen Weng

Dr. Helen Weng, PhD, is a neuroscientist and clinical psychologist who is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (Core faculty at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine; affiliate faculty member at the Neuroscape Center). Dr. Weng studies meditation from a neuroscientific perspective, and is interested in how meditation may foster emotion regulation to improve relational and physical health. She is developing new ways to quantify meditation skills using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and machine learning to identify mental states of body awareness during meditation. She is also using community engagement with the East Bay Meditation Center (Oakland, CA) to increase the diversity of meditators included in neuroscience studies. Dr. Weng’s earlier work showed that short-term compassion meditation may increase both altruistic and neural responses to suffering. Her work has been featured in the NY Times, BBC, and NPR, and she was named by her peers as one of the 10 Powerful Women in the Mindfulness Movement at mindful.org.