Slide show: Dalai Lama Visit
When the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds held grand-opening events May 15-16, a familiar guest was on hand to celebrate the occasion. As he has a number of times — most recently in 2007 — His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama traveled to Madison to continue ongoing work with the new center’s director, Richard Davidson, a UW–Madison professor of psychology and psychiatry, who also directs the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior. Davidson, who has studied Tibetan monks to explore how meditation affects the brain, established the new center to investigate healthy qualities of the mind and how to cultivate those qualities in children and adults. The weekend’s events included a private scientific meeting, a presentation by mindfulness meditation pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn, and a public dialogue with the Dalai Lama and Davidson at the Overture Center for the Arts.