We care deeply for science, contemplation, collaboration, community, and life on a healthy planet. We are passionate and curious humans. We experiment with novel ways of co-creativity and mutual support. We practice bringing head, heart, and hand together. We sometimes call ourselves “enActivists”.
My academic background is in nuclear and particle physics and computer simulations, with a master’s degree in physics from the Graz University of Technology and a PhD degree in physics from the University of Innsbruck. I was a member of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN from 2010-2017.
I began exploring contemplative practices in 2005, with an initial focus on Theravada and Zen Buddhism and a growing interest in Dzogchen.
In 2012 I met Scott Virden Anderson, director of the Yoga Science Foundation, who supported my career transition towards Contemplative Science. Intrigued by the vast potential and immense challenge of “bridging” scientific collaboration with contemplative practices and community-building, this journey led me to found the Contemplative Scientific Collaboration (CSC) project in September 2016 and the Mindful Researchers initiative in August 2020, with support by the Yoga Science Foundation.
As an Independent Researcher affiliated with the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE), I contribute to research projects and publications related to open and collaborative science. I support community-building and hosting teams as a process facilitator at conferences, workshops and other events.
I am passionately building bridges to connect seemingly disjunct domains of human endeavor and experience. The mysteries of life, nature, mind, and our universe give me chills of awe and wonder. My heart also lights up for process facilitation (Art of Hosting), storytelling (Way of Council), participatory decision-making (certified moderator for Systemic Konsensing®), holding space for the unknown, heartfelt communication, poetry, filmmaking, deep ecology, contact improvisation, dancing, and walking barefoot.
Educated in liberal arts & sciences (UCM, Maastricht), and brain and mind sciences (UCL London, ENS & UPMC Paris), I am currently finishing my PhD in embodied cognition (UKE, Hamburg). My research involves lab experiments and interdisciplinary work around the idea that thoughts and behaviour are based on a web of relations – involving our brain and body, but also our social and cultural community, our ecology.
I care about this topic pragmatically: I gather and develop tools to notice, invite and expand the bodily, personal and environmental bases of my scientific work. To do so, I integrate ideas and activities from other traditions, in particular improvisation, movement and listening practices (e.g. contact improvisation, Feldenkrais, circle/council, sports). Find more on this, here.
I seek radical inclusion: I want to ask questions (rather than impose answers), be transparent about my motivation and choices, and invite playful dialogue with every view I encounter. My experiment is to sense into the constraints and possibilities of any real situation I find myself in – one moment of one collaborative project at a time. While I run experiments, write and defend my PhD thesis – while I build a garden house with my brother – while I love and feel close to very different people and circumstances.
Frank is an interdisciplinary cognitive scientist currently based in Paris at Laboratoire de Systèmes Perceptifs (École Normale Supérieur) and Institute de la Vision (Sorbonne). He is interested in perception and action, mindful movement, self and improvisation, within the framework of embodied cognition, in particular sensorimotor theory, enactivism and predictive models. Frank enjoys Feldenkrais and has contributed to a pilot study on changes to neural activity and to body awareness elicited by it. He also has a gift for asking useful questions.
Dav does data intensive movement research. He is a cognitive and data scientist based in Scottsdale, Arizona. A long-term meditation practitioner, he enjoys Feldenkrais and Contact Improvisation, and has co-authored a paper on “Mindful movement and skilled attention” with Frank. Dav is also the father of an adorable 2-year old boy who teaches him and his wife new things every day. In his spare time, he is working to decenter the legacy of white supremacy and exploitation in the world. He welcomes allies in this effort!