Aviva Berkovich-Ohana
Faculty of Education, Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center and The Brain and Behavior Hub, University of Haifa, Israel
Aviva Berkovich Ohana is a professor of neuroscience, at the Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center and The Brain and Behavior Hub, in the Faculty of Education, at the University of Haifa, Israel. She is currently head of the Integrative Psychotherapy Program in the Department of Counseling and Human Development. She received her PhD in neurobiology from the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-llan University, Israel, and did her post-doctoral studies at the Weizmann Institute, Israel. Her major research interests include: the effects of various contemplative mental training, including meditation, psychedelics, lucid dreaming and channeling, on consciousness, cognition, and sense of self. Her lab utilizes a broad spectrum of neuroimaging tools, behavioral and cognitive tasks, and phenomenology, with an emphasis on neurophenomenology in collaboration with proficient contemplative practitioners.
Aviva Berkovich-Ohana
Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center; University of Haifa
Lenore Blum
Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science, Emerita, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), United States
Lenore Blum (PhD, MIT) is a mathematician and Theoretical Computer Scientist looking at consciousness from a Theoretical Computer Science (TCS) perspective.
This follows her longstanding passion to connect seemingly unrelated areas, from her early work showing foundational connections between model theory (a branch of mathematical logic) and differential algebra, to her later work developing a theoretical basis for scientific computation in continuous domains akin to the Turing-based theory for discrete domains. At CMU she was co-Director of the National Science Foundation seeded ALADDIN Center fostering synergy between algorithm theory and applications.
Lenore is internationally known for her work in increasing the participation of girls and women in STEM and is proud that CMU has gender parity in its undergraduate CS program. She was a founder of the Association for Women in Mathematics and recipient of the US Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.
Lenore has been active in the scientific professional societies. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society, the Association for Women in Mathematics, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Lenore is currently president of the Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science (AMCS). “I am honored and humbled to be included in this most welcoming community, working in the most exciting field of my lifetime. Many thanks to the AMCS and the ASSC for giving me the opportunity.”
Lenore Blum
Carnegie Mellon University
Robin Carhart-Harris
Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor in Neurology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Weill Institute for Neurosciences, Carhart-Harris Lab, University of California San Francisco, USA
Prof Carhart-Harris became the Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professorship in Neurology and Psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2021 and founded the Carhart-Harris Lab at UCSF in 2023. Prof CH moved to Imperial College London in 2008 after obtaining a PhD in Psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol. Prof CH and colleagues have completed multimodal human functional neuroimaging studies with LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and DMT, and clinical trials of psilocybin therapy for various disorders, including three trials in depression, - plus trials in anorexia and fibromyalgia syndrome. Prof CH has published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Nature Medicine, Cell, Lancet Psychiatry, Science Advances, JAMA Psychiatry, American Journal of Psychiatry, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and more. He founded the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London in April 2019, the first of its kind in the world. He spoke at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in 2019, was named among the top 31 medical scientists by The Times newspaper in 2020, was listed in TIME magazine’s ‘100 Next’ in 2021, was voted psychedelic researcher of the year in 2021, and was listed in Vox Magazine’s ‘Future 50’ in 2023 - a list of positive change makers. His current research program at UCSF is focused on the mechanisms of action of psychedelics and psychedelic-therapy.
Robin Carhart-Harris
University of California, San Francisco
Monima Chadha
Professor of Indian Philosophy, University of Oxford; Research Fellow,Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies, UK
Monima completed her undergraduate and master’s at Delhi University, India. She earned her Ph.D. from Monash University and subsequently worked at Monash in the Department of Philosophy. Monima was the inaugural Karp fellow at the Sage School of Philosophy Cornell University, and the winner of the inaugural Annette Baier Prize. Her main research interests are in the Philosophy of mind in the classical Indian and contemporary western traditions, most recently focused on the Buddhist no-self views and their implications for our concepts of subjectivity, agency, responsibility, and the ethical life. She is the author of Selfless minds, OUP 2023 and numerous journal articles. She is an Editor of Philosophers Imprint.
Monima Chadha
University of Oxford;
Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies
Nikos Makris
Cognitive Scientist, President of the Hellenic Psychological Society, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece
Nikos Makris is a Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Democritus University of Thrace. Over the past two decades, he has served as a principal investigator in numerous EU-funded research projects focusing on cognitive development and education. His research interests include theory of mind, the development of executive functions across preschool, school-age, and adolescence, metacognition, conceptual understanding, and various aspects of cognitive development. Findings from his research have been disseminated through numerous publications and presentations at international conferences. Together with Andreas Demetriou and other colleagues, he co-developed the Theory of Developmental Priorities, contributing significantly to the field of cognitive development. He has published over 60 papers in esteemed national and international journals, including Intelligence, Cognitive Development, WIRES, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He is also the author of Philosophical, Psychological, and Neuroscientific Approaches to Consciousness (in Greek) and has edited the Greek editions of three International Handbooks of Psychology. Professor Makris currently serves as the President of the Hellenic Psychological Society and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Democritus University of Thrace. Previously, he was Editor-in-Chief of Psychology: The Journal of the Hellenic Psychological Society. His academic career includes visiting researcher appointments at the Center for the Child Development and Growth, University of Michigan, USA, and the Department of Psychology, University of Nicosia, Cyprus. He has been invited to deliver lectures at prominent international and national conferences, most recently (November 2023) as a guest speaker at the Department of Education, Harvard University.
Nikos Makris
Democritus University of Thrace,
President of the Hellenic Psychological Society

Lionel Naccache
Paris Brain Institute,
President-Elect ASSC
Nicholas Schiff
The Jerold B. Katz Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience in the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine and the Graduate Program in Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, with additional appointments as Tenured Professor of Neuroscience, Professor of Neurology, and Professor of Medical Ethics in Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, United States
Dr. Schiff is an internationally recognized physician-scientist with expertise bridging basic neuroscience and clinical investigative studies of recovery of impaired consciousness and cognition following structural brain injuries. He is the recipient of several awards including the prestigious Research Award for Innovation in Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience, in 2007. Most notably, Dr. Schiff and colleagues have combined preclinical and clinical studies of the neurophysiological mechanisms of arousal regulation and deep brain electrical stimulation (DBS) techniques to demonstrate evidence that long-lasting, severe cognitive disability may be influenced by electrical stimulation of the central thalamus. First, in a 2007 Nature paper demonstrating that long-standing minimally conscious state could improve with DBS; most recently, in a 2023 Nature Medicine paper demonstrating that a group of chronically cognitively impaired subjects with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury could be significantly improved with DBS. In parallel work, Dr. Schiff and his international colleagues have led the development of diagnostic evaluations of recovery of consciousness in severely brain-injured persons. In a landmark 2024 New England Journal of Medicine study they reported the finding from a study involving hundreds of persons with a disorder of consciousness that at least one in four can harbor hidden high-level cognitive capacities.
Nicholas Schiff
Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute
at Weill Cornell Medicine
Catherine Tallon-Baudry
Cnrs senior scientist, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Université PSL, Paris
Catherine Tallon-Baudry is a CNRS senior scientist in Cognitive Neuroscience at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. She earned her PhD in Neuroscience in Lyon, France in 1997, showing the existence of gamma-band oscillations in humans and their role in visual cognition, a line of research she further developed as a Marie-Curie post-doctoral fellow in Bremen, Germany, using ECoG recordings in awake monkeys. She obtained a Cnrs tenure position and moved to to Hospital Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris to create her own research group, where she unexpectedly found a double-dissociation at the neural level between spatial attention and visual consciousness. This led her to question the view of consciousness as a high-level cognitive function. To concentrate on subjective experience, she moved to the Department of Cognitive Sciences at Ecole Normale Supérieure to create a new research group developing and testing the neural subjective frame hypothesis, which posits that the first-person perspective inherent to subjective experience and the minimal self are rooted in visceral signals, particularly from the heart and the stomach. These rhythmic, self-generated signals may provide a temporal scaffold that coordinates neural activity across different brain regions, facilitating the integration of disparate sensory and cognitive processes into a unified, self-centered experience.
Catherine Tallon-Baudry
Ecole Normale Supérieure,
Université PSL