Joyce Macalalad volunteers as the Interim Associate Creative Director at Life Support, where she supports creative strategy and storytelling initiatives that advance the organization’s mission. With a background in healthcare operations, project management, and human-centered design, she is passionate about creating systems and experiences that help people thrive. Joyce enjoys blending creativity, empathy, and data-driven problem solving to turn ideas into meaningful impact.
CCARE People
Bonnie Kim, M.Ed, MBA
Bonnie Kim, M.Ed, MBA is helping shape a more human-centered future for medicine through innovation, compassion, and storytelling. As Director of Innovation at the STAARA Lab and Director of Narrative Research and Education at Stanford’s CCARE, she develops education, experiences, and tools that support well-being, self-compassion, and human connection for doctors and nurses. She also produced the award-winning short film Life Support, screened at more than 90 festivals worldwide and now used in compassion education at CCARE.
Bonnie brings more than 20 years of experience across entrepreneurship, executive coaching, nonprofit leadership, and storytelling. She founded an executive coaching firm where she also trains new coaches. Her clients and collaborators include leaders from the World Economic Forum, Entrepreneurs’ Organization, Apple, Google for Startups, LinkedIn, PwC, Ernst & Young, Estée Lauder, Cirque du Soleil, Zapier, Fivetran, Medely, and Compton College. She has spoken on panels including UN Women and is a Council of Urban Professionals Fellow.
Across her work, she is drawn to one challenge: turning meaningful ideas into something that improves how people live, lead, and care for one another.
Angela Kim
Angela Kim graduated from UC Berkeley. She is a Rhodes Scholarship Finalist, a National Udall Scholar, and the 1st-place Recipient of UC Berkeley’s Jengyee Prize. She serves on the World Health Organization (WHO) Youth Council. Angela received the UC Berkeley Major Citation Award and the UC Berkeley Departmental Citation Award, which are the highest honors awarded to one graduating senior across the entire academic major and department.
Angela is deeply passionate about advancing the human side of medicine through storytelling, the arts, AI, and health innovation. She is committed to cultivating a practice of medicine rooted in compassion, connection, and humanity. Angela’s interests also span climate health, health policy, environmental justice, and health systems resilience. She leads the Hydrogen Blending Resistance Coalition, serves on the Public Health Advisory Council for Los Angeles and Orange County, and has presented at the United Nations (UN) conference.
Lee Eskey
Lee Eskey is a compassion educator, leadership trainer, and facilitator with more than 25 years of experience helping individuals and groups cultivate emotional awareness, healing, and compassion. A certified Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) instructor, he has taught CCT in numerous formats and settings, including higher education. He also co-developed Stanford CCARE’s Cultivate a Compassionate Heart course, which he taught from its inception.
Along with his wife, Britta, Lee is co-founder and co-director of COR, where he leads experiential workshops and leadership and facilitation trainings. His work integrates compassion with emotional maturity, mindful presence, somatic awareness, self-responsibility, and trauma-informed approaches. He has worked with therapists, educators, ministers, artists, and business leaders, helping them embody and facilitate compassion in their lives and work.
Lee is Chair of Acting at John Paul the Great Catholic University, where he also teaches Mindfulness and Compassion Cultivation. He has provided compassion training at the National College of Ireland and is passionate about bringing compassion education into Catholic higher education. He also lectures on Theology of the Body, Pope John Paul II’s holistic vision of the human person, and is completing certification through the Theology of the Body Institute.
Lee is a certified NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) trauma-informed practitioner, a Family Constellations facilitator, and a facilitator of Nonviolent Communication. He is also a founding board member of the nonprofit COR Community Foundation.
Jennifer Scott
As the Senior Director of Operations, Jennifer Scott oversees operations for CCARE including, strategic planning, program development, financial management, and human resource management to ensure the resources and infrastructure are in place to fulfill our mission of developing compassion through programming and research.
Prior to CCARE, Jennifer was with the University of Washington School of Dentistry RIDE program, focused on training dentists for practice in rural and underserved communities throughout the Pacific Northwest. She also has extensive management experience as the Director of Merchandising for Starbucks Coffee Company.
Jennifer received her BA in Social Welfare/Psychology with an emphasis in Public Health from the University of California Berkeley.
Britta Eskey
Britta Eskey is a compassion educator, author, and leadership facilitator with over 40 years of international experience guiding individuals and groups through emotional healing, personal growth, and spiritual development. She is a certified Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) instructor and was co-developer and instructor of CCARE’s Cultivate a Compassionate Heart course.
Together with her husband, Lee, Britta is co-founder and co-director of COR, where she develops and facilitates experiential workshops and leadership trainings. A certified NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) trauma-informed practitioner, she draws on extensive experience in social work, Gestalt therapy, Family Constellations, and somatic approaches to healing.
Decades of accompanying people through suffering and life’s challenges have deepened her understanding of the healing power of compassionate presence and authentic human connection. A daily meditator for over 20 years, Britta is passionate about contemplative practice, creating embodied experiences of compassion, and teaching compassionate communication as a pathway to truthful and loving connection in everyday relationships.
Britta is the author of Initiations in Love, a spiritual memoir exploring the transformative potential of life’s challenges, and host of the Initiations in Love podcast, where she explores the lived experience of love and compassion with teachers and leaders in the field, including CCARE’s Robert Cusick and Neelama Eyres.
Sara Owens Woodard, PhD
Sara Owens Woodard, PhD is a retired psychologist whose area of expertise is treating young children with complex trauma and attachment system dysfunction. This work includes training extended family and larger systems serving these young children.
Dr. Woodard provided reflective supervision and training to first responders in underserved communities. These responders included child protection workers, infant home-visitors, indigenous community leaders, teachers, nurses, physicians, therapists, and psychologists.
Dr. Woodard has also developed and delivered short, accessible forms of loving-kindness and compassion training as part of a comprehensive personal development program for physician leaders and operational leaders in a Fortune 100 healthcare organization. These trainings focused on developing skills for emotion regulation, building healthy, collaborative relationships, increasing resilience, and preventing burnout. She delivered similar programs to physicians and professionals in smaller organizations serving children and families in under-resourced communities. Sara is a Buddhist practitioner with almost forty years of formal meditation training.
Sara is the Co-Director of Compassion in Healthcare at CCARE and a founding teacher of the 8-Week Compassion & Wellbeing in Healthcare course. She is excited to be a part of CCARE’s healthcare team.
Dev Dash, MD, MPH
Dr. Dev Dash is an emergency physician, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Stanford University, and Co-Director of Innovation at Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE). Fellowship-trained in clinical informatics, his work sits at the intersection of medicine, artificial intelligence, digital health, and compassion. His research focuses on developing and evaluating technologies that improve clinical decision-making, patient safety, and the delivery of care, with particular interests in computer vision, natural language processing, and quality improvement in digital health. He is especially interested in how artificial intelligence can be designed and applied to strengthen compassion, communication, and human connection in healthcare. Through CCARE’s innovation work, Dr. Dash also explores how technology, storytelling, and the humanities can address clinician burnout, moral injury, compassion, and meaning in medicine. He is helping lead the development of Life Support, an initiative that uses film and storytelling to examine the human experience of healthcare and create new approaches to education, reflection, and clinician well-being. Across his work, Dr. Dash focuses on advancing healthcare innovation while ensuring that technology strengthens, rather than diminishes, the humanity at the heart of medicine.
Kyla O’Neill
Kyla O’Neill is the Program and Research Manager at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University. Driven by a deep commitment to mission-centered work that fosters learning, human connection, and well-being, Kyla brings expertise in program development, digital marketing, and operational systems to help CCARE’s programs reach the people seeking them.
In her role at CCARE, Kyla manages the day-to-day operations of CCARE’s educational programs — overseeing participant experience, marketing and enrollment, event coordination, and data reporting. She also collaborates with the team on strategic initiatives to help grow and sustain the center’s mission.
Kyla holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Gender Studies from the College of the Holy Cross and an Elementary Teaching Credential from San Francisco State University. Her background spans a decade as an elementary educator, another decade running a small business, and most recently leading program operations for an online career school, enabling thousands of adult learners to successfully embark on a new career. Her varied experience brings a diverse perspective to her work at CCARE.
Kyla’s personal and professional values are closely aligned with CCARE’s mission, and she is committed to building the systems and experiences that help compassion-centered programs flourish and grow.
Maryam Makowski, PhD
Dr. Maryam S. Makowski, PhD is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Associate Director of Scholarship and Health Promotion for Stanford Medicine’s WellMD & WellPhD. As a medical nutrition scientist, Certified Nutrition Specialist, and National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, Dr. Makowski provides nutrition consultations and well-being coaching to Stanford School of Medicine faculty and Stanford Medicine residents and fellows. She also serves patients of the Lifestyle Psychiatry Clinic.
Dr. Makowski’s research focuses on identifying strategies to minimize physician fatigue and stress, and optimize their wellbeing. In her coaching , she uses evidence-based strategies to empower her clients by cultivating compassion for themselves and others with the ultimate goal of improving their well-being, energy and focus for peak performance.
In recognition of her coaching efforts, she received the 2024 Annual Chairman’s Award for Clinical Innovation and Service in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Bornali Basu, PhD
Dr. Bornali Basu, PhD is a psychologist and Clinical Instructor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry. She specializes in the treatment of depression and anxiety, working primarily with healthcare professionals navigating work and life transitions, as well as college students to help ease adjustment related distress.
Dr. Basu completed her internship and post-doctoral fellowship at the NYU School of Medicine and previously was a Senior Psychologist at Bellevue Hospital where she founded and was the director of the integrative Mind-Body Program for people living with chronic medical issues. She is a CCARE certified instructor particularly interested in promoting wellbeing among clinicians, has presented at national conferences on the topic and has facilitated compassion-based programs to reduce burnout at multiple healthcare systems in New York. She is on the senior faculty at the Center for Compassionate Leadership.
Bornali is the Co-Director of Compassion in Healthcare at CCARE and a founding teacher of the 8-Week Compassion & Wellbeing in Healthcare course. She is delighted to be part of CCARE’s healthcare team and looks forward to collaborating and connecting with our community.
Andrew Chu, MD, MBA, MPH
Dr. Andy Chu is a board-certified emergency physician, Clinical Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Stanford University, and Co-Director of Innovation at Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE). His work sits at the intersection of medicine, healthcare innovation, and storytelling. He has more than a decade of experience leading multidisciplinary teams developing technologies to improve clinical decision-making and patient care in complex, time-critical environments. Alongside this work, he uses film and the arts to explore the human experience of medicine, including burnout, moral injury, compassion, and meaning in clinical practice. His award-winning short film, Life Support, has screened at dozens of film festivals and received multiple jury awards for Best Short Film. Through both innovation and the humanities, Dr. Chu focuses on advancing medicine while preserving the humanity at its core.
Diana Adams, EdD
Diana O. Adams, EdD is an Adjunct Professor in the Stanford Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Adams is a psychologist specializing in the management of chronic pain and medical conditions that affect mood and functioning. Her career has focused on hospital- and clinic-based care, with extensive experience working alongside physicians and other health care professionals.
Since joining Stanford in 1995, Dr. Adams has held numerous medical staff leadership roles. In a role uncommon for a psychologist, she was elected by the Community Medical Staff in Psychiatry to serve as Deputy Chief for Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences for five consecutive two-year terms. She also served for ten years as a voting member of Stanford’s Medical Executive Committee and contributed to several committees focused on medical staff conduct, physician well-being, and psychologist wellness.
Dr. Adams brings a distinctive perspective to health care leadership, informed by decades of clinical work and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by health care professionals. She is the Director of Compassion Cultivation Training for Physicians and Psychologists at CCARE and teaches the 8-week course, Compassion Cultivation Training for Physicians and Psychologists.
Jennifer Nadel
Jennifer Nadel is a pioneer in the emerging field of compassionate politics, working to bring the science and practice of compassion into the political arena. She speaks globally about the transformative power of compassion and provides training to those working in the political arena including at the UN and the UK Houses of Parliament.
She founded the think tank, Compassion in Politics, together with Matt Hawkins in 2018. It works on a cross-party basis with 100+ politicians in the UK to improve political processes and outcomes and their advice is sought internationally. Their original research is cited in parliament, influences policy, and has led to new legislation being debated. In 2022 she helped establish the Global Compassion Coalition which now has a global reach of millions.
Jennifer advises and trains grassroots and national campaigns, has run for the UK Parliament, and served on the National Executive Committee of the Green Party. In 2018 she stepped away from party politics to focus on building common ground.
Her Sunday Times Bestseller, WE: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere, co-authored with Gillian Anderson, is a guide to inner and outer change and a rallying cry to move to a less me-centric society. It was featured on shows including CBS This Morning, The View, Dr Oz, the BBC and ITV. Jennifer continues to provide training based on it.
Her most recent book, How Compassion can Transform our Politics, Economy and Society, co-edited with Matt Hawkins, has been hailed as a guide to creating a more compassionate world.
Jennifer is a qualified barrister and award-winning journalist who has broadcast for the BBC. and ITV, from around the world. A regular media commentator, Jennifer speaks internationally at organisations including: Google, Apple, Bloomberg, AOL Build, JP Morgan, the Oxford Union, and at leading universities. American born, she’s currently based in London.
Monica Worline, PhD
Monica Worline, PhD is an organizational psychologist and founder and CEO of EnlivenWork, an innovation organization that teaches businesses and others how to tap into courageous thinking, compassionate leadership, and the curiosity to bring their best work to life. Monica is an award-winning teacher and an interdisciplinary scholar who has served on the faculty of Goizueta Business School at Emory University and on the faculties of the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California Irvine and the UC Irvine School of Social Ecology.
Monica’s writing has been featured in publications such as Harvard Business Review, Chicago Tribune, and BizEd Magazine and her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Organization Science. She authored the book Awakening Compassion at Work and is a founding member of the CompassionLab, the world’s leading research collaboratory focused on compassion at work.
Monica completed her doctoral work in organizational psychology at the University of Michigan and is a member of the Positive Organizational Scholarship community housed in the Ross School of Business. She earned her BA with distinction and honors at Stanford University, where her emphasis on humanities continues to provide a strong foundation for her unique blend of critical thinking and creativity.
Emma Seppala, PhD
Emma Seppala, PhD is Science Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. Her areas of research include positive organizational psychology, health psychology, and cultural psychology. In particular her research has focused on well-being, compassion, social connection and mind-body practices.
She is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, Psychology Today, The Huffington Post, and Scientific American Mind. She also consults with Fortune 500 leaders and employees on building a positive organization and is the author of an upcoming book on the science of success, The Happiness Track, published by HarperOne (January 2016). She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Fulfillment Daily, a news site dedicated to the science of happiness.
Dr. Seppala’s research has been cited in numerous television and news outlets including ABC News and The New York Times and she is quoted in books such as Congressman Tim Ryan’s Mindful Nation . Her research on mind-body practices for military veterans with trauma was highlighted in a documentary called Free the Mind by award-winning filmmaker Phie Ambo. She is the recipient of a number of research grants and service awards including the James W. Lyons Award from Stanford University, where she helped found Stanford’s first academic class on the psychology of happiness and taught many well-being programs for Stanford students.
Dr. Seppala received a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University, a Master’s Degree in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University, and a PhD in Psychology from Stanford University. She completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Dr. Richard Davidson. Originally from Paris, France, she speaks five languages: French, English, German, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. Outside of her experiences in the US, she has worked in France and China.
For more, see her website.
James Ehrlich
James Ehrlich is an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University School of Medicine. Additionally, James is appointed Faculty at Singularity University, Senior Fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, and a White House / OSTP Appointee to a joint taskforce on Regenerative Infrastructure.
Mr. Ehrlich is also the Founder of ReGen Villages Holding, B.V., a Stanford University spin-off formed in the EU as a Dutch impact-for-profit company, using machine learning software to address the U.N. 17 Sustainable Development Goals, specifically to provide solutions for affordable housing, climate change adaptability, and regenerative resiliency.
Mr. Ehrlich founded ReGen Villages in 2016, with its patent-pending VillageOS™ operating system software to design and operate bio-regenerative and resilient (self-reliant) neighborhood infrastructure and retrofits, integrating clean water, renewable energy micro-grids, high-yield organic food, and circular nutritional flows at the neighborhood scale, to promote healthy long-term outcomes for residents and flourishing communities.
A serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley for over 25-years, James successfully founded and managed technology and media companies with successful exits. For nearly a decade, Mr. Ehrlich executive produced an award-winning national public broadcasting series based on his case study research of organic and bio-dynamic family farms, that at its apex reached over 35-million homes each week and is also the co-author of a best-selling companion book on Hachette, Organic Living THG (2007).
James holds a Bachelor of Science from New York University and Master studies in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. He has won several awards for sustainable design and is a researcher and global lecturer on the topic of regenerative neighborhood development. He has co-authored two (2) U.N. Sustainable Development Goal Platform Briefs (2015/2018) with Prof. Larry Leifer and Chris Ford (AIA) from the Center for Design Research at Stanford University.
Daniel Martin, PhD
Dr. Daniel E. Martin is an Associate Professor of Management at California State University, East Bay, and Director of Corporate Compassion Education at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University. Formerly a Visiting Associate Professor at CCARE, a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law & Society at UC Berkeley, Director of Research at the Charter for Compassion a Research Fellow for the U.S. Army Research Institute as well as a Personnel Research Psychologist for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, he has worked with private, public and non-profit organizations on pre-employment selection, training, and organizational assessment. He has held international appointments at Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco, Villahermosa, Mexico and The D’Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR), Rio De Janiero, Brazil.
Dan holds a Ph.D. in Social and Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Howard University, Washington, D.C., and a BS in Clinical Psychology from San Francisco State, California.
Dan’s research interests include: compassion, social capital, ethical behavior, racism and prejudice, human resources assessment, religiosity, spirituality and humor. Dan has held TEDxHayward at CSUEB highlighting quantitative efforts in Peace Innovation twice.
Dan is published in a range of journals including Journal of Business Ethics, Personnel Review, Human Organization, Ethics and Behavior, and the Journal of Applied Psychology. His current research streams investigate the impact of individual differences and ideology on social corporate responsibility and human resources decision making. Other streams involve the impact of ideology on compassion and psychological well-being. His current applied work on the use of untapped social capital to ameliorate social problems serve as a research, skills development and assessment platform. Dan is also the founder and CEO of Arete Science, LLC, which scales interventions and measurable impact in competence and well-being across a wide array of social and individual needs (Business, Leadership, Psychedelics, SUD and more).
Robert Cusick
Robert Cusick is the Director of Compassion Education at CCARE Stanford University and a Co-Founder of the Applied Compassion Training (ACT) that was formerly offered at CCARE Stanford from 2020-2023. He is a Stanford Lecturer and Sr. Certified CCARE instructor and teaches at Stanford University, UCSF, Kaiser Permanente Medical Centers, and in multiple other venues.
As a long-time meditator and former monastic, Robert ordained in Myanmar (Burma) under the renowned meditation master, Ven. Pa Auk Sayadaw, and studied with him from 2003 – 2012. He has studied in numerous contemplative traditions including Soto Zen while in residence at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, in the Ridhwan School’s Diamond approach with A. H. Almaas (Hameed Ali), and for 27 years in the Insight Meditation tradition with Gil Fronsdal, PhD and a host of others. He provides grief counseling and bereavement support for adults and children at Kara in Palo Alto, where he co-leads men’s grief groups and facilitates retreats for fathers grieving the death of a child.
Robert sits on the Board of Directors of the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies.
Neelama Eyres
Neelama Eyres is the Director of Program Development at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University. She is the Co-Founder of the Applied Compassion Training (ACT) that was formerly offered at CCARE Stanford from 2020-2023.
For the past 25 years, Neelama has developed and facilitated experiential programs for individuals, groups, and leaders worldwide. She’s trained participants to enact and apply compassion within their organizations, institutions, and communities around the globe. She is the co-author of a personal memoir which details her journey through a Compassionate Divorce.
Throughout her career, Neelama has provided training, consulting, and executive coaching for organizations including Google, Slack, MetLife, the Alzheimer’s Association, and many more. In addition, she has trained and developed facilitators within corporations, non-profits, and healthcare organizations.
She is also Co-Founder and Lead Facilitator for The Inner Journey Institute, an educational organization that has offered transformational programs across the United States, Canada, and Europe since 1999. For IJI, she has designed and facilitated highly immersive workshops and facilitator trainings geared towards helping participants embody higher levels of compassion, mindfulness, forgiveness, and personal transformation for themselves, their organizations, and their communities.
Neelama’s mastery is creating interactive, immersive, and experiential learning environments that allow participants to have a direct and embodied experience of spirituality and compassion. Neelama’s contemplative practice combined with her extensive travels throughout Southeast Asia and India have given her an extraordinary depth of spiritual experience and knowledge of Eastern traditions which, like her studies of Western spirituality, is reflected in all her work.
To learn more about Neelama visit her website.
Stephanie Balters, PhD
Stephanie Balters, PhD is a neuroscientist, educator, and innovator pioneering the neuroscience of collective thriving. Her work demonstrates how deep connection, trust, and shared purpose can drive measurable gains in team performance and wellbeing.
As the Director of Research at CCARE and Director of the Empowerment Neuroscience Lab in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, she uses portable dual-brain neuroimaging to advance understanding of the neurobiology of real-world human interaction. Her research identifies the neural mechanisms through which compassion, trust, and collaboration emerge—demonstrating that collective thriving is not just an ideal to aspire to, but a high-return investment in human potential.
Dr. Balters develops and rigorously tests neuroscience-informed interventions that translate empirical insight into organizational outcomes. Through living laboratories across Stanford Medicine, the Graduate School of Business, and Stanford Athletics, she applies her findings to cultivate compassion, connection, and collective excellence.
With background training in mechanical engineering, computer science, human-centered design, and clinical neuroimaging, she spans disciplines to build tools, teams, and cultures where compassion functions as a scalable driver of excellence. Her mission is to unite scientists, educators, clinicians, and organizational leaders across institutions to launch a global hub advancing the science and implementation of compassion—turning scientific insight into real-world impact for a more connected, thriving society.
For collaborations or questions, please contact balters@stanford.edu.
Al’ai Alvarez, MD
Al’ai Alvarez, MD is a Stanford emergency physician and recognized national leader in clinician well-being, compassion, and high-performance teams.
He is a Clinical Professor in Stanford Emergency Medicine and Director of Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. He also serves as Director of Well-Being for Stanford Emergency Medicine, Co-lead of the Human Potential Team, and Fellowship Director for the Physician Wellness Fellowship. At the Stanford Medicine WellMD/WellPhD Center, he chairs the Physician Wellness Forum and directs the Physician Resource Network Support Program, Stanford’s peer-to-peer support program for faculty and trainees.
Dr. Alvarez’s work focuses on humanizing physician roles and supporting teams in high-performance clinical environments. He challenges the false divide between compassion and performance, showing how human-centered systems can strengthen trust, learning, safety, and team effectiveness. His work connects clinician well-being, process improvement, clinical operations, quality, peer support, leadership development, and professional fulfillment.
From 2016 to 2021, Dr. Alvarez served as Assistant and Associate Residency Program Director for the Stanford Emergency Medicine Residency Program. He regularly gives grand rounds and leads national and international lectures and workshops on self-compassion, clinician well-being, leadership, mentorship, compassion, and high-performing teams.
His recent honors include the 2022 John Levin Leadership Award at Stanford Health Care, the 2024 Sharp Index Physician Leader of the Year Award, and a 2025 Excellence in Our Workplace Award Honorable Mention through the Stanford Health Care Medical Staff Awards. He was also selected as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Medical Sciences for Brazil through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program for 2026-2027 and received the 2026 Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo.
Dr. Alvarez is a member of the inaugural cohort of ambassadors for CCARE’s Applied Compassion Training and has completed several compassion-based education programs, including Compassion Cultivation Training and Awakening Humanity at Work.
James R. Doty, MD
James R. Doty, MD was the founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford, of which His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the founding benefactor. Dr. Doty was a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who was on the faculty of the Stanford University School of Medicine in the Neurosurgery Department. Most recently, his academic focus was on meditation, compassion, and self-compassion for which he lectured throughout the world.
Dr. Doty attended U.C. Irvine as an undergraduate, received his medical degree from Tulane University and completed neurosurgery residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Dr. Doty served 9 years on active duty in the U.S Army attaining the rank of major. He completed fellowships in pediatric neurosurgery and electroneurophysiology.
He was an inventor, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He held multiple patents and was the former CEO of Accuray (ARAY:NASDAQ). Dr. Doty provided support to a number of charitable organizations supporting peace initiatives and providing healthcare throughout the world. Additionally, he supported research, provided scholarships, and endowed chairs at multiple universities.
Dr. Doty was a consultant to medical device companies and was an operating partner and advisor to venture capital firms. He served on the Board of a number of non-profits and was the vice-chair of the Charter for Compassion International and the former chair of the Dalai Lama Foundation. He was on the Senior Advisory Board of the Council for the Parliament of the World’s Religions and served on the Board of Governors of Tulane University School of Medicine and the President’s Council at Tulane University.
James R. Doty, MD was the New York Times bestselling author of Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discovery the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart now translated into 40 languages. Dr. Doty was also the senior editor of the Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science. His final book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything was published by Penguin Random House in May of 2024.
Erika Rosenberg, PhD
Erika Rosenberg, PhD, is Director of Community and Belonging at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University. Beginning in January 2027, she will also serve as Director of Compassion Education. Erika has deep roots at CCARE as a co-creator of Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) with Thupten Jinpa and others and as one of CCARE’s founding teachers.
Dr. Rosenberg brings more than 30 years of experience across the intersecting fields of emotion science, contemplative practice, and education. Her contemplative background spans decades of personal practice and teaching, informing her work to help people better understand themselves and one another, strengthen human connection, and respond to suffering with greater awareness and compassion.
She is a member of the Saron Lab at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, Founding Faculty at The Compassion Institute, and faculty at the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley. An expert in human facial expression and emotion, her scholarship spans affective science, contemplative science, emotional behavior, and health psychology.
Dr. Rosenberg is co-editor of What the Face Reveals with Paul Ekman and co-author of Psychology: Perspectives & Connections. At CCARE, she works to strengthen community across educational programs, build connections with compassion-related work across Stanford, and create opportunities for people to bring compassion into everyday life.