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. 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 the 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. 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.