Dusana Dorjee, PhD is a cognitive neuroscientist heading the Well Minds Lab. Dusana established the lab in 2011 and developed its research programme in translational neuroscience of mental health and wellbeing. Dusana has authored and co-authored over 30 peer-reviewed articles and peer-reviewed book chapters. She wrote three peer-reviewed monographs published by Routledge. Dusana’s latest book Making Sense of Mental Health and Wellbeing in Primary Schools: A Practical, Neuroscience-Based Guide – specifies key capacities underpinning mental health and wellbeing and presents a trauma-informed 7-Step approach to fostering these capacities systematically and gradually across primary school years.
Much of the content presented in the book created the basis for a new comprehensive mental health and wellbeing curriculum for primary schools in England called The Foundations for Wellbeing. Over the past two years Dusana worked on this curriculum with the PSHE Association as part of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project funded by UKRI Innovate UK. Her previous two books focused on contemplative neuroscience – ‘Mind, Brain, and the Path to Happiness‘ (2013) and ‘Neuroscience and Psychology of Meditation in Everyday Life‘ (2017). Dusana has been contributing to mental health and wellbeing policy initiatives – for example, she was an academic consultant for the Health and Wellbeing Areas of Learning for the new Welsh curriculum and contributed in an advisory role to development of a UNESCO SEL primer for school teachers. You can find more about Dusana’s latest public engagement activities on her personal website.
………………………………………………………………………………
PhD students
Qi Wang is a PhD researcher in the Psychology in Education Research Centre supervised by Dr. Dusana Dorjee at the University of York. She has backgrounds in both Public Health (MPH) from the Dartmouth College and Accounting & Business Administration (BS. with Magma Cum Laude) from Florida Southern College in the United States. She worked for the Department of Compliance and Audit Services at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) from 2016-2017 where she gained experience in healthcare and data analysis. She then worked for the Third-Brain Research Institute and the Healthcare and Life Science Lab at Senses Global Labs & Ventures in China for 2 years where she developed an interest in mental health and cognitive function with technology. Qi is also an international standard developer where she gained experience and interest in physiological technology.
She serves as the general secretary at the IEEE P2790 Biometric Liveness Detection Working Group, and the first IEEE Standard for Biometric Liveness Detection was published in 2020. Her research focused on psychophysiological measurements of self-regulation/executive function and wellbeing from a public health perspective. She is interested in digital biomarker with non-invasive methods to predict self-regulation and wellbeing. Her PhD project develops the smartphone-based photoplethysmography (e.g. heart-rate variability) derived assessment of self-regulation, wellbeing, and spontaneous thought/mind-wandering in higher education students.
Rosie Lennon is studying at York University for a PhD in Psychology in Education with a research area focusing on the mental health and well-being of children in schools. Rosie has been in education since 1994, starting out as a Bursar having been an accountant. Rosie then trained as a teacher under GTP to eventually become a headteacher. During that time Rosie studied for the National Professional Qualification in Headship (NPQH), Specific Learning Difference (SpLD), Forest School and gained a MSc in Teaching and Learning at Oxford University. Since retiring as a headteacher, Rosie has continued to provide specialist teaching in schools and counselling for children.
Rosie has a passion for all children to achieve their very best and in recent years studied for the Diploma in Humanistic Integrated Counselling and this led to an understanding of how trauma and personal life experiences can have a significant impact on children’s learning. At 63 years of age Rosie herself, has a wealth of life experiences, including working with refugees under the SVPRS for five years. All this, she hopes will be useful in her quest to make a difference to children’s futures through study, research and publications.
………………………………………………………………………………
PhD student Alumni
Jessie Shepherd, PhD
Joshua Stubbs, PhD
Thy Nguyen, PhD
Shelby DeMeulenaere, PhD
Rebekah Kaunhoven, PhD
Kevanne Sanger, PhD
………………………………………………………………………………
Alumni Lab Visitors
Professor Xianhua Liu, Hengyang Normal University, China
Dr. Rastislav Sumec, Department of Neurology, St. Anne’s University Hospital, Brno, Czech Republic
Dr. Lena Wimmer, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Desiree Sartori, University of Padua, Italy
Marco Cappi, University of Padua, Italy
Dr. Marcio Sussumu-Hirayama, University of Campinas, Brazil