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Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, PhD, has conducted research in neuroscience, biological rhythms, and sleep since 1978. Since 2001, he has been fully engaged in research on the efficacy of yoga and meditation practices in improving physical and psychological health. He has been personally involved in the practice of a yoga lifestyle since 1971 and is a certified instructor of Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan. He is currently the Director of Research for the Kundalini Research Institute, Research Director for the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, Research Associate at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine, Board Member of the Guru Ram Das Center for Medicine and Humanology, Scientific Advisor for the Alzheimer’s Research and Prevention Foundation, and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, USA.

Dr Khalsa has conducted federally funded clinical research trials evaluating yoga for insomnia, posttraumatic stress disorder, chronic stress, and generalized anxiety disorder. His current primary interest is the evaluation of the efficacy of yoga within the academic curriculum of public schools to determine the benefits to students in mental health characteristics, including perceived stress, resilience, emotion regulation, and anxiety; and this work is funded federally and by the Kripalu Institute for Extraordinary Living. He views yoga as a practice deserving of widespread implementation within society, including into the educational and medical systems.

Dr Khalsa has relationships and collaborations with fellow yoga researchers internationally, working closely with the International Association of Yoga Therapists to promote research on yoga therapy, and serving as the scientific coordinator for the annual Symposium on Yoga Research and as editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Yoga Therapy. He is author of the Harvard Medical School ebook entitled Your Brain on Yoga and since 2005 he has been teaching an elective course at Harvard Medical School in mind–body medicine.

Dr Lorenzo Cohen is the Richard E. Haynes Distinguished Professor in Clinical Cancer Prevention, Director of the Integrative Medicine Program, and Chief, Section of Integrative Medicine, Department of Palliative, Rehabilitation, and Integrative Medicine at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He is also Distinguished Clinical Professor, Fudan University Cancer Hospital, Shanghai, China. Dr Cohen is a founding member and past president of the international Society for Integrative Oncology and is passionate about educating others on how to prevent cancer and maintain optimal health throughout life. As the majority of cancers are preventable, Dr Cohen is conducting research to demonstrate that lifestyle factors including healthy diet, physical activity, stress management, and social support – in other words, leading a yogic lifestyle – can influence cancer outcomes. Dr Cohen leads a team conducting NIH-funded research and delivering clinical care of integrative medicine practices such as meditation, Tibetan Yoga, Patanjali-based yoga, tai chi/qigong, massage, diet, exercise, acupuncture, and other strategies, such as stress management, music therapy, emotional writing, and more aimed at reducing the negative aspects of cancer treatment and improving quality of life and clinical outcomes. He is interested in examining different types of complementary programs that can be easily incorporated into conventional cancer treatments to decrease the psychophysiological consequences associated with treatment and to improve outcomes. Dr Cohen has conducted some of the first randomized clinical trials of yoga in cancer patients and continues this important research today, examining the psychological, behavioral, physiological, Editors xiii FM.indd 13 4/1/2016 12:13:44 PM xiv and biological benefits of yoga. He was the recipient of the 2007 International Scientific and Technological Cooperation Award of Shanghai Municipality, the 2008 Magnolia Silver Memorial Award, and the 2011 Magnolia Gold Memorial Award for his contributions in furthering research into the use of traditional Chinese medicine.

Timothy McCall, MD, is a board-certified internist and the author of two books, Examining Your Doctor: A Patient’s Guide to Avoiding Harmful Medical Care (Citadel Press) and Yoga as Medicine: The Yogic Prescription for Health and Healing (Bantam Books). He practiced medicine for more than 10 years in the Boston area before devoting himself full-time to investigating and teaching yoga therapy. He is the Founder/Director of Yoga as MedicineSM Seminars and Teacher Trainings and the Co-Director of the Simply Yoga InstituteSM for Yoga Therapy and Holistic Health, in Summit, New Jersey, near Manhattan.

Timothy has traveled extensively, studying with many of the world’s leading yoga teachers and yoga therapists including BKS Iyengar and TKV Desikachar. His main teachers have been Patricia Walden, Rod Stryker, and Donald Moyer. He has practiced yoga and meditation from various traditions for over 20 years and Tantra for more than a decade. Since 2005, he has studied with a traditional ayurvedic doctor, Chandukutty Vaidyar, and has spent more than a year at his clinic in Kerala, India.

McCall’s articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Redbook (where he was a contributing editor), the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Boston Globe. His column appeared monthly in the newsletter Bottom Line Health between 1995 and 2003, and from 1996 to 2001 his medical commentaries were featured on the public radio program Marketplace. In 2004–5 he was a scholar-in-residence at the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and since 2002 he has been the medical editor of Yoga Journal. He has given presentations at medical schools, the NIH, and numerous workshops, and keynote addresses at conferences sponsored by Yoga Journal, the International Association of Yoga Therapists, and the Smithsonian Institute. He teaches yoga therapy seminars and teacher trainings in Summit, New Jersey, and worldwide.

Shirley Telles has a degree in conventional medicine (MBBS) after which she completed an MPhil and PhD in Neurophysiology at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru, India. Dr Telles’ MPhil and PhD theses were related to research on the effects of yoga practice and their applications in health and rehabilitation, and she has continued her research in this area since then. After her doctorate she joined the Swami Vivekananda Research Foundation in Bengaluru and had the unique postdoctoral experience of setting up the laboratories there before starting research. Dr Telles received a Fulbright fellowship in 1998 to assess fMRI in meditators, which was conducted at the Department of Radiology, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA. She has been awarded the first ever Indian Council of Medical Research Center for Advanced Research in Bengaluru to assess the effects of meditation through autonomic and respiratory variables, evoked and event related potentials, polysomnography and fMRI. This was followed by a grant from the Department of Science and Technology to study attention in meditators using high density EEG and event related potentials during fMRI. Since 2007, Dr Telles has been the Director of the Patanjali Research Foundation in Haridwar, India, which is committed to researching the effects of yoga and ayurveda. She has 152 yoga-related publications cited in major research databases, and is first and main author on most of these. Dr Telles has been invited to talk on yoga and its applications in health and treatment across India and internationally, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Norway, Portugal, Serbia, the UK, and the USA. Dr Telles finds that the response to yoga worldwide is interesting and enriching; she is an enthusiastic practitioner of yoga, and believes that yoga research can positively impact all aspects of life.