In January, BrainMind hosted BrainMind @ JP, a gathering during JP Morgan Week, where groundbreaking discoveries, engaging conversations, and genuine connections came to life. The event featured intimate sessions with visionary entrepreneurs and thought leaders in BCI, neuromodulation, consciousness, mind training, and more.
Throughout the day, attendees explored interactive neurotech demos showcasing the latest innovations in the field, engaged in collaborative sessions fostering deep discussions with experts and peers, and attended keynote talks from leading entrepreneurs and thought leaders in neurotechnology and mind science
This gathering was designed to ignite thoughtful conversation, inspire collaboration, and provide a unique opportunity to explore the transformative innovations shaping brain and mind science.
BrainMind Salons are invitation-only. All participants are members of the BrainMind ecosystem and are carefully selected for potential contribution, influence, and intent. Apply below if you are interested in attending gatherings like this.
Memories
Agenda:
January 15th:
2:00PM - Arrivals, Experiential Neurolab Opens
3:00PM - Breakouts
4:00PM - Lightning Talks
5:00PM - Light Bites and Conversations
7:00PM - Fireside chat with Reid Hoffman, Michael McCullough, and Jay Sanguinetti
7:30PM on - Quaffes, Canapés, and Connections
January 16th:
1:00PM - Meditation
6:30PM - Post Reception
Co-Hosts
Experiential Neurolab
The gathering included a hands-on Experiential NeuroLab with exciting inventions and technology demonstrations. Participating companies included:
Intheon develops a middleware platform for real-time processing and interpretation of neural and other biosignals, allowing developers to integrate advanced neurotechnology into everyday applications across fields like health, human performance, learning, and entertainment by utilizing brain and body signals through their platform.
Intheon
E11 Bio is a non-profit philanthropically-funded Focused Research Organization developing next-generation technology to accelerate neuroscience and improve human health.
E11 Bio
TRIPP develops immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences designed to promote mindfulness, relaxation, and focus through guided meditations, visuals, and soundscapes
TRIPP
Neurotechnology company advancing novel therapies for the brain, geared at reducing inflammation.
Humanity Neurotech
Openwater is making novel complex medical devices using ultrasound, photonics and electromagnetics to treat aggressive cancers, debilitating mental disorders, and incapacitating strokes.
OpenWater
INTO is a perception company at the intersection of science and experience through scientifically derived doses of light and sound helping the world reduce stress, increase focus, performance and sleep better.
INTO Technologies
Sanmai
High Frequency Highway is a wellness app that uses scientifically-backed sound frequencies and binaural beats to help users manage stress, improve sleep, enhance mental clarity, and achieve overall well-being. The app combines ancient sound healing techniques with modern neuroscience to create a personalized and effective experience.
High Frequency Highway
Valence Vibrations uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze vocal tone and classify emotions in real-time during conversations, translating spoken words into emotional insights by identifying the speaker's sentiment through their voice, aiming to improve communication by bridging emotional gaps across different people and cultures.
Valence Vibrations
Reveri Health, Inc. develops and offers a self-hypnosis mobile app, that helps users to better manage their mind and body, through interactive audio sessions.
Reveri
Sonera is developing wearable sensors that can detect biomagnetic fields generated by neural activity, creating a technology to measure brain activity through non-invasive magnetic sensing.
Sonera
Shiftwave develops a wellness technology using pulsed pressure waves to stimulate the nervous system, aiming to alleviate stress, improve sleep, enhance focus, and promote overall mental and physical restoration
Shiftwave Technologies
Breakout Discussions
Special breakout discussions allow attendees to go deeper on specific topics. Roundtables with 8-12 participants convene around preselected BrainMind topics with brilliant subject matter experts who are leaders in their respective fields. The breakouts are designed to encourage conversation and collaboration with presenters and other great minds.
Susan (“Suz”) MacCormac is a Partner at Morrison & Foerster, specializing in growth equity and impact investing, structuring and corporate governance and social enterprise. She co-led the drafting group for the first of the new corporate forms - the Social Purpose Corporation in California - which later evolved into the Public Benefit Corporation in Delaware. With more than 25 years of experience, Suz has also developed hybrid/tandem corporate structures, creatively deployed the Perpetual Purpose Trust for both closely held and public companies, crafted debt and equity instruments that balance impact with traditional financial terms and leveraged corporate law to create innovative capital market solutions for pressing environmental challenges. She also advises the boards of public and private companies on corporate governance and fiduciary duties, particularly as applied to sustainability and climate change.
Suz was a founding board member of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), is a member of the board of directors of Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), having served as its primary corporate counsel for 20 years and is a board member of Stone Barns/Blue Hill, Habitat Capital/Habitat for Humanity, the Earth Genome Project, and is an advisor to the UN Environment Program Finance Initiative. She is an Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, where she began teaching a new climate finance and governance course in the fall of 2022 (after nine years of teaching social enterprise). She is also a member of the American Law Institute and an Advisor to the Restatement of Law, Corporate Governance.
In addition to being recognized as a leader in impact investing (Brand 1) by Chambers USA 2024, Suz has received numerous accolades, including being named one of the Most Innovative Lawyers by the Financial Times in 2015 and California Lawyer of the year in 2012 and 2016. She is deeply committed to advancing sustainability and social good through her legal practice and dedicates more than $3M per year in pro bono services.
Suz holds a B.A. from Williams College and received her J.D. and LL.M. degrees from Duke University School of Law.
Susan Mac Cormac, Morrison & Forester LLP
Effective Solutions to Maximize Positive Impact From Your Health Care Company or Investment
Peter is an entrepreneur & investor. Following the successful exit of his GenAI sales company, he founded a BCI / DBS company for Alzheimer's, including Neuralink, Blackrock & Paradromics co-founders.
He advises on BCI the German government and contributes to the ISO BCI group, iBCI-CC, and the FDA.
As a Core Angel of Springboard Health Angels, an LP, and part of a new fund, Peter invests in transformative health and neurotech ventures, spanning from pre-seed to early growth stages.
Peter Schlecht, BCI Expert
Closing the Gap to One Billion Neurotech Users
Jay is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona where he co-directs the SEMA (Sonication Enhanced Mindful Awareness) lab with Shinzen Young. SEMA lab investigates how mindfulness practice impacts the brain and behavior, and whether focused ultrasound neuromodulation can augment mindfulness practice. He is also the Assistant Director at the Center for Consciousness Studies at Arizona.
Jay received his PhD in Cognition and Neural Systems in 2014 from the University of Arizona. His doctoral research focused on neural oscillations related to visual perception and feedback models of vision. He used several methods to study visual perception, including EEG, eye-tracking, and unconscious masking.
During his graduate training, he also used invasive and noninvasive neurostimulation to study a wide range of topics, including cognitive control, attention, working memory, emotion and mood. Jay has been at the forefront of the growing field of
transcranial ultrasound for human neurostimulation, conducting one of the first human experiments to date showing that ultrasound can enhance mood in healthy participants. As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona, he used concurrent EEG-fMRI to study the neural basis of depression.
From 2016-2018, Jay was a postdoctoral fellow for the Army Research Labs, where he investigated neuromodulation and mindfulness training. Jay is also the Assistant Director for the Center for Consciousness Studies, which runs the largest conference on the study of consciousness.
Jay Sanguinetti, Sanmai Technologies, PBC
Positive Language Models
Dr. Sará King is a neuroscientist, political and learning scientist, medical anthropologist, educator, social entrepreneur, public speaker, and certified yoga and meditation instructor.
She is an internationally recognized expert in researching and teaching about the relationship between the neuroscience of mindfulness, community alternative medicine, art, and social justice. She is passionate about creating healing spaces to experience and understand the relationship between individual and collective healing and well-being.
She currently works as a post-doctoral fellow with a joint appointment in Public Health and at the Center for Empathy and Social Justice in Human Health at the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion at UCSD; is a creative director and facilitator at Mobius, a non-profit that specializes in the stewarding and development of "liberatory technology"; as well as she is the Founder of MindHeart Consulting, through which she brings her expertise in creating interventions for healing intergenerational trauma to the world, and MindHeart Collective, a company developing "contemplative AI" technology based off of her neuroscience research.
In 2021, she was named "One-To-Watch" by Mindful Magazine and was on the cover of November's (2021) Yoga Journal Magazine as a "Game Changer" for her history-making UCLA dissertation research and social justice efforts in changing the way the practice of yoga is viewed globally.
Dr. King has been invited to consult, create trauma healing circles, scientific lectures, and keynote speeches for Nike, the Jordan Brand, the Ford Foundation, Google, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, Harvard Medical School, Columbia University, OHSU, UCLA, UCSF, and Oxford University, among many others.
Sará King, MindHeart AI
The MOLA: Using AI to Map Human Transformation and Consciousness for Collective Healing
Dr. O’Donovan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (DPBS) at the University of California, San Francisco, Research Psychologist at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, and Director of the UCSF Trauma and Health Research on Immunity, Vitality, and Emotions (THRIVE) Laboratory. Her work focuses on uncovering mechanisms of stress-related ill health with a particular focus on inflammation as a mechanism of both mental and physical disorders following stress exposure. In prior work, she has demonstrated strong links of psychiatric disorders with risk for major chronic medical diseases; elevated inflammatory activity in association with psychiatric disorders and suicide ideation; links between elevated inflammation and alterations in brain structure, as well as accelerated biological aging in association with psychiatric disorders and psychological factors. Funded by the Department of Defense, the National Institute on Mental Health, and the UCSF Resource Allocation Program, she is currently running experimental studies to examine the impact of inflammation on the brain and psychiatric symptoms, randomized controlled trials of cognitive training and pharmacological interventions for PTSD, and studied focused on uncovering the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in people with and without PTSD.
Aoife O'Donovan, UCSF
Transdiagnostic Effects of Psychedelic Therapy: A Biological Perspective
Lightning Pitch Presenters
Carolina Aguilar - CEO, INBRAIN
Jun Axup - COO, E11 Bio
Blake Gurfein - CEO, Humanity Neurotech
Tracy Brandmeyer - CEO, Cognigenics
MJ Antonini - CEO, NeuroBionics
Matt Angle - CEO, Paradromics
Mary Lou Jepsen - CEO, OpenWater Health
David Spiegel - CEO, Reveri
Nolan Williams - Magnus Medical
Nishita Deka - CEO, Sonera
Fireside Chat
Reid is a Silicon Valley stalwart in the modern technology world. An accomplished entrepreneur and executive, he played an integral role in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses, including LinkedIn and PayPal. As an investor, he has been instrumental in the success of iconic companies such as Facebook and Airbnb and has helped fast-growing startups like Aurora and Convoy get to scale.
Beyond startups and technology, Reid has a wide range of interests, including politics, board games, science fiction, philosophy, and philanthropy. He serves on several not-for-profit boards, including Kiva, Endeavor, CZI Biohub, the Berggruen Institute, New America, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and the MacArthur Foundation’s Lever for Change. Reid has received various awards for his philanthropic work, including an honorary CBE from the Queen of England and the Salute to Greatness Award from the Martin Luther King Center.
Reid Hoffman, Greylock
Michael McCullough, M.D., M.Sc. is the Founder of BrainMind. He is an EIR at Greylock Partners, impact investor and Partner at Capricorn Healthcare, social entrepreneur, and emergency room professor at UCSF. Michael’s personal interest in the brain extends from a childhood brain hemorrhage which resulted in hydrocephalus and a severe stutter, partially corrected by brain surgery at age 10 and requiring Michael to retrain himself to speak through high school and early college at Stanford. Accomplishing fluent speech also required extensive biofeedback and meditation practice. After returning from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Michael co-founded QuestBridge during free hours in medical school at UCSF and his surgical residency at Stanford. QuestBridge, a national non-profit, now places more talented low-income students into top colleges like Stanford, Yale, Caltech, and MIT than all other non-profits combined. Michael has since founded or co-founded 12 successful companies and non-profits.
Michael is a founder of RegenMed Systems, a co-founding investor of HeartFlow, and on the founding board of 2U -- all top performing impact investments. Michael also served/serves on the boards of the Metabiota, the Global Leadership Incubator, QuestBridge, and the Dalai Lama Foundation among others, and serves as an on-call ER physician for the Dalai Lama during his visits to the West Coast.
Michael McCullough, BrainMind
Jay is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona where he co-directs the SEMA (Sonication Enhanced Mindful Awareness) lab with Shinzen Young. SEMA lab investigates how mindfulness practice impacts the brain and behavior, and whether focused ultrasound neuromodulation can augment mindfulness practice. He is also the Assistant Director at the Center for Consciousness Studies at Arizona.
Jay received his PhD in Cognition and Neural Systems in 2014 from the University of Arizona. His doctoral research focused on neural oscillations related to visual perception and feedback models of vision. He used several methods to study visual perception, including EEG, eye-tracking, and unconscious masking.
During his graduate training, he also used invasive and noninvasive neurostimulation to study a wide range of topics, including cognitive control, attention, working memory, emotion and mood. Jay has been at the forefront of the growing field of
transcranial ultrasound for human neurostimulation, conducting one of the first human experiments to date showing that ultrasound can enhance mood in healthy participants. As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona, he used concurrent EEG-fMRI to study the neural basis of depression.
From 2016-2018, Jay was a postdoctoral fellow for the Army Research Labs, where he investigated neuromodulation and mindfulness training. Jay is also the Assistant Director for the Center for Consciousness Studies, which runs the largest conference on the study of consciousness.
Jay Sanguinetti, Sanmai Technologies, PBC
The Meditation
Participants joined a guided mediation on January 16th with Dustin DiPerna, an internationally recognized meditation scholar and teacher. It is an opportunity to connect with a rarified group of hand-picked individuals via contemplative experience and instruction.
We explored advanced concentration techniques and develop heightened metacognitive skills. Drawing from the renowned Direct Pointing Out style, this session used accessible language to guide participants into deeper states of practice, blending Western scientific insights with the ancient wisdom of Indian and Tibetan traditions.
Dustin DiPerna is a world-renowned meditation teacher, respected for his clear and profound guidance rooted in Tibetan lineages. Practitioners worldwide seek his teaching, and participants of all experience levels will gain meaningful access to deeper spiritual states.
The Guide
Dustin DiPerna is a visionary leader, entrepreneur, and recognized expert in world religions. He has committed his life to making timeless spiritual wisdom relevant and accessible for a rapidly changing global society. Through writing, teaching, coaching, and entrepreneurship, Dustin helps individuals and groups to find happier and more fulfilling ways of being in the world. He is author of three books - Streams of Wisdom, Evolution's Ally, and Earth is Eden - and co-editor of The Coming Waves.
Dustin has spent more than a decade of close study with American Philosopher, Ken Wilber, who has publicly declared that Dustin’s work “fundamentally alters the way in which religion or spirituality can (and should) be taught and practiced.” For the past 8 years, Dustin has been practicing and studying in the spiritual lineages of Mahamudra and Dzogchen under the direction of Daniel P. Brown. Dustin has a lifelong commitment to being both student and practitioner.
Dustin has held positions with the Integral Institute, the Integral Spiritual Center, and the World Council of Religious and Spiritual Leaders (WCORL). As an entrepreneur, Dustin first launched Integral Publishing House as a platform to publish a series of carefully curated books, each selected to stimulate the development of deeper levels of consciousness and culture. He next co-founded WEpractice, a training program to help people move beyond the limitations of individualized spiritual practice to discover the power of groups in transformation, integration, and healing. WEpractice has trained over 500 practitioners as well as a new cohort of leaders who continue work around the globe. Dustin played a central role on the leadership team for the Global Cooperative Forum in Interlaken, Switzerland, exploring how a deeper understanding of spiritual awakening might inform cooperative efforts of social action. Building on this success and sensing the need for deeper collaboration among global organizations, Dustin launched the World Business Commons in partnership with the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. His latest venture, Bright Alliance, is building an endowment for the continued preservation and dissemination of the great treasure trove of human wisdom sourced in our world's great religious traditions.
Dustin holds an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and a MA in Religion from Harvard University. An avid lover of art, design and nature, he lives in California with his wife, Amanda, and daughters, Jaya and Rumi.
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