“We were extremely impressed with the quality of submissions for this round of seed grants,” said TRIADS co-director Bo Li. “These projects represent WashU faculty asking big, provocative questions and assembling high-quality, transdisciplinary teams to study them.”

Sound can be a powerful anchor for meditation. Yet the resources available to both researchers and musicians are often constrained: researchers need a stable set of compositions and recordings that meet certain criteria, and musicians often search for advice beyond playing old favorites or improvising. This transdisciplinary, artistic work will contribute to our broader community via the composition of repetitive loops conducive to meditative states, both written and recorded, all ultimately made freely available to researchers and therapeutic musicians alike.

Several WashU faculty members contributed to various parts of the report, including Education faculty Michelle Purdy and Carol Camp Yeakey.

"For all of us who know Michelle, we know her to be an amazing professor who emulates pure passion and sincere commitment."

Partnership with U. City School High School has led to a drop in suspensions, improved school culture.

The proposed study will test a newly developed emotional support intervention for teachers. The intervention will provide a toolkit of effective emotion management strategies and different ways people think about their emotions, including how to utilize mindfulness personally and how to be more mindful with their students.