Meet the team
Center for Healthy Minds staff and affiliates
Principal Investigator
Dan Grupe
Dan is a Research Assistant Professor at the UW-Madison Center for Healthy Minds. Originally from St. Louis, Dan has spent over 15 years at UW-Madison as a grad student, post-doc, scientist, and research professor. Dan leads the Cultivating Justice CoLab, which conducts research on community-engaged, contemplative approaches to promoting mental health and well-being for individuals impacted by the criminal legal system. A few of Dan’s favorite things: gardening, fermentation, bicycles, curling, road trips with Molly, and long walks with Harry and Leroy.
Research assistant professor
Christy Wilson-Mendenhall
Christy is a Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Healthy Minds. Her highly interdisciplinary research draws on perspectives from situated cognition, constructionist approaches to emotion, and contemplative philosophies to investigate well-being as an active process of life-long learning, practice, and transformation. She brings expertise in measures development and well-being frameworks to our research on mindfulness for reentry.
Assistant professor
Virginia Medinilla
Virginia is an Addiction Psychiatrist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UW-Madison and Core Faculty at the Center for Healthy Minds. Her passion and expertise are in working with individuals in recovery from co-occurring mental health and addictive disorders. Virginia’s research interests include the use of meditation and other contemplative approaches for the understanding and treatment of psychiatric illnesses, particularly substance use and other addictive disorders.
doctoral student
Patrick Nolan
Patrick is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology, a Research Assistant at the Center for Healthy Minds, and is a Teaching Assistant for a number of sociology and criminology courses. He is most recently teaching The Art and Science of Human Flourishing course through CHM. Patrick’s interests include the social mechanisms behind inter- and intrapersonal transformation among currently and formerly incarcerated people with a particular focus on how intersubjective experiences of identity and purpose may shift in response to engagement with mindfulness practices, wholesome communities, and wholesome mindfulness practice communities.
Research specialist
Mia Lauder
Mia is a MSW student and Research Specialist in the CoLab. Her background in public defense and neuropsychology research contribute to her interests in restorative justice and mind+body well-being. Her research interests include community-based interventions for incarcerated or formerly incarcerated individuals. She is also interested in neurodiversity, disability advocacy, and the over-arrest and heightened imprisonment rates of adolescents and adults with neurodevelopmental disorders. She is largely interested in criminal legal system reform and improving the quality of life for individuals in and outside of prisons. In her free time she enjoys painting, fashion design, cheer coaching and walks with her rescue border collie: Luna.
Community Resource Coordinator
Brendon Panke
Brendon is the Operations and Community Resource Coordinator at the Center for Healthy Minds. He has a particular interest on the use of narrative to make meaning and cultivate self-understanding. His approach to narrative is informed most strongly by improv and narrative medicine. In addition to his work at the Center for Healthy Minds, he leads personal narrative storytelling classes at Columbia Correctional with the Odyssey Beyond Bars program.
Mental performance coach and Director of Meditation training
Chad McGehee
Chad is the Mental Performance Coach and Director of Meditation Training for UW Athletics, the founder of Inner Edge Meditation, and an honorary affiliate of the Center for Healthy Minds. He is a long-time collaborator on research and training efforts surrounding mindfulness and policing, and is also involved in our recent train-the-trainer curriculum.
Associate professor
Pajarita Charles
Paja is an Associate Professor at the Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work and director of the Lab for Family Wellbeing and Justice. Pajarita collaborates with us on our research on mindfulness and reentry.
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Kaia Berghahn
Kaia is an undergraduate student majoring in art history and legal studies. Born and raised in Madison, Kaia has loved finding new and meaningful opportunities to connect with her community through the CoLab. On, Wisconsin!
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Jane Berglin
Jane is an undergraduate research assistant at the Center for Healthy Minds. Her work with the Cultivating Justice CoLab has ignited a passion for studying, improving, and advocating for the implementation of restorative justice approaches. As a senior studying psychology at UW-Madison, she is excited to engage with formerly incarcerated individuals and learn how to amplify their resilience through community-engaged research.
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Scott Cahya Pickett
Scott is an undergraduate research assistant at the University of Wisconsin – Madison for the Cultivating Justice Co-Lab and the Psychotherapy and Contemplative Science Lab. As a Psychology and Political Science student, he is passionate about carceral rehabilitation and the human ability to grow and flourish through shifting conceptions of The Good Life and success. He also has growing interests in clinician-assisted psychedelic therapy for the purposes of psychological treatment in trauma, PTSD, and personality disorders. As well as identifying similar mechanisms of meditation, awe, and psychedelics.
Community Partners
Mindfulness instructor
Carmen Alonso
Carmen is a licensed clinical psychologist, certified mindfulness instructor, and Tae Kwon Do instructor. Her nonprofit organization, Just Mindfulness, works to develop and implement mindfulness-based interventions with a social justice orientation. She is a collaborator on research initiatives to bring mindfulness practices to police officers and formerly incarcerated individuals, and is a volunteer with the Wisconsin Prison Mindfulness Initiative and the Prison Ministry Project restorative justice program.
Certified peer specialist and Study navigator
Aaron Hicks
Aaron is the co-executive director of The Voices of Power — a nonprofit organization that works to restore the voice of the voiceless — and a violence interrupter at Focused Interruption. Aaron is a Certified Peer Specialist (CPS) with additional Train the Trainer certification. He co-facilitates mindfulness groups and is a key collaborator in CoLab research projects, including the Mindful Reentry clinical trial and our community advisory board.
Certified peer specialist and Study navigator
Deb Mejchar
Deb is a Chaplain with certification in grief counseling who worked for 17 years in the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. She works with the Prison Ministry Project on bringing restorative justice programs to prisons across Wisconsin. As a Certified Peer Specialist (CPS), she walks alongside incarcerated peer specialists who serve others while serving time, and she has received additional Train the Trainer certification. She co-facilitates mindfulness groups and is a key collaborator on CoLab research projects.
Nehemiah VP for research and education
Karen Reece
Karen is an adjunct faculty in the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, and the Vice President for Research and Education at the Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development, where she provides program evaluation, research, and strategic support and does strategic planning for Justified Anger, an initiative designed to reduce systems-level racial disparities. Karen supports community advisory board activities and collaborates on research on mindfulness and reentry.
Certified peer specialist and Study navigator
Demell Glenn
Demell is a Certified Peer Specialist (CPS) and Trainer dedicated to restorative justice. He works with many local community organizations including EXPO, JustDane, Safe Communities, and MOSES where he uses CPS skills and lived experience to provide mentorship and guidance to the people he serves. Demell completed the CoLab Train the Trainer program and utilizes mindfulness in his CPS work. Demell is a study navigator for the mindfulness and reentry clinical trial, and plays an integral part in the development and implementation of CoLab projects.
Alumni
Sophia received her Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction from UW-Madison in 2022, collaborating with the CoLab on qualitative research on mindfulness and policing. She is currently a consultant with the Connecticut State Education Resource Center.
Augusta graduated from UW-Madison in 2023 with majors in Human Development & Family Studies and Psychology. As a McNair Scholar, Augusta led research on mindfulness-based stress reduction for BIPOC mental health professionals.
Ted contributed to our research on mindfulness and policing as a research specialist, publishing a first-author paper on PTSD symptoms and sleep quality in police officers. He is a Ph.D. student in the UW-Madison Neuroscience Training Program.
Jonah was the study coordinator for our NIJ-funded RCT on mindfulness for police officers. He received a master’s degree from the Colorado School of Public Health before returning to his home state of Vermont to work in public health.
Sam conducted research on wearable data with police officers as an undergraduate majoring in mathematics and psychology. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Network Science at Northeastern University.
Amalie was a University Research Scholar with the CoLab and carried out research on police officer well-being throughout her college career, including studies on gender differences in stress and a benefit-cost analysis of mindfulness training for police officers. She is a Research Analyst at the Urban Institute in the Housing Finance Policy Center.