A professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, Evan Thompson has written extensively on how human consciousness, as inherently intersubjective, may be entwined with the rest of nature. His most recent book, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, which was published earlier this year by Harvard University Press, argues that because our mental lives are so deeply involved with our bodies and the world beyond us, they cannot be reduced simply to brain processes inside the head. The starting point of much of his inquiry over the past decade and a half is that the mind, as a scientific object, presupposes our empathetic cognition of each other. Dr. Thompson is a cum laude graduate of Amherst College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1990. While writing his dissertation, he studied at the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (CREA) at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and (with Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch) wrote The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991), one of the first books to explore systematically the relationship between Buddhist thought, particularly meditative psychology, and cognitive science. His postdoctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley and at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) Fellowship. Dr. Thompson began his teaching career at the University of Toronto as an assistant professor of philosophy in 1991. After appointments at Concordia University in Montreal, Boston University, and York University in Toronto, where he became an associate professor of philosophy in 1998 and held a Canada Research Chair, he was named to his present position in 2005. He has been a visiting professor at CREA, the Center for Subjectivity Research of the Danish National Foundation in Copenhagen, and at the University of Colorado and is currently a fellow of the Lindisfarne Association, which was founded by his father, the social philosopher William Irwin Thompson. His work has been supported by several grants from the SSHRCC, and for six years he held a McDonnell Fellowship in Philosophy and Neuroscience. Co-director for the Association for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, a member of the board of advisors of the Santa Barbara Institute for the Study of Consciousness, and of the scientific advisory board of the Mind and Life Institute, he was formerly executive editor for philosophy of mind of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and is currently on the editorial committee of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Dr. Thompson is the author of some forty-five articles in academic journals and chapters in volumes of collected works and the editor or co-editor of five books, including, most recently, (with Philip David Zelazo and Morris Moscovitch) The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, which was published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press. In addition to Mind in Life, he is also the author of Colour Vision: A Study of Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception (1995). Dr. Thompson is currently writing a new book entitled Buddha and the Brain: Contemplative Neuroscience and the Nature of Consciousness, which explores how Asian contemplative traditions and Western mind-brain science can collaborate beyond the science/religion divide in order to create new ways of scientifically investigating human consciousness and of fostering contemplative wisdom and cognitive spirituality.