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Catherine Kerr received a B.A. from Amherst College, and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University. She was a postdoctoral fellow and Instructor at Harvard Medical School, where she received a career development award from the NIH to conduct research in the cognitive neuroscience of meditation. In 2011, she joined the Department of Family Medicine and the Contemplative Studies Initiative (for which she is Director of Translational Neuroscience) at Brown University. Her work has been published in Journal of Neuroscience, BMJ, Brain Research Bulletin and other journals, and has been covered in the New York Times, Technology Review and Forbes.