Michael R. Sheehy, PhD is a meditation researcher whose work illuminates the generative, dynamic, and ever-evolving processes of contemplative practices. His scholarship and experimental studies query contemplative dynamics at the junctures of the history of religion, empirical phenomenology, and the cognitive sciences to understand the workings of consciousness and its transformations. Trained in Buddhist Studies, he studied extensively with Tibetan scholars and meditation masters in Tibet. Michael specializes in the nondual meditative traditions of Buddhism in Tibet – namely, Dzogchen, Mahāmudrā, and Zhentong.

He is a Research Associate Professor and the Director of Research at the Contemplative Sciences Center, University of Virginia. As founding Principal at the CIRCL, Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab, he directs a transdisciplinary experimental collaboratory that studies how contemplative practices work in bodies and minds, cultures and ecologies, ourselves and our worlds. The CIRCL team uses multiple methods including EEG-ECG (brain-heart physiology), microphenomenology, ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and self-report measures to understand underlying dynamics of contemplative experiences. He is cofounder and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Contemplative Studies, a peer-reviewed open access journal that publishes original scholarship. He co-directs the AI + Human Flourishing Initiative that investigates the bidirectional loop of how technologies of intelligence can enhance human flourishing, and how lived human knowledge, can inform the human-AI interface. Additionally, he holds appointments by courtesy in the Department of Religious Studies and UVA Tibet Center. At the University of Virginia Press, he is the coeditor of two monograph series: Varieties of Contemplative Experience and Traditions and Transformations in Tibetan Buddhism. Read More.