Francisco J. Varela

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Francisco J. Varela (died in 2001) was a cofounder of the Mind and Life Institute. According to his web site he "received his Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard in 1970. His interests centered on the biological mechanisms of cognition and consciousness, and he contributed over 200 articles to scientific journals on these matters. He also wrote or edited fifteen books, many of them translated into several languages, including The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1992) and most recently Naturalizing Phenomenology: Contemporary Issues in Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (Stanford University Press, 1999) and The View from Within: First-Person Methods in the Study of Consciousness (Imprint Academic, London, 1999)... The recipient of several awards for his research, he was Foundation de France Professor of Cognitive Science and Epistemology at Ecole Polytechnique, Director of Research at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, and Head of the Neurodynamics Unit at LENA (Laboratory of Cognitive Neurosciences and Brain Imaging) at the Salpetrière Hospital, Paris. He was the founding scientist of the Mind and Life series, and published several articles and books on the dialogues between science and religion, including Gentle Bridges (Shambhala, 1991) and Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying (Wisdom, 1997) covering the first and fourth of the Mind and Life dialogues."

• Founding Fellow, Lindisfarne Association
• Founding Member, Integral Institute
• Member, General Evolution Research Group