Lily is a doctoral student in the Counseling Psychology Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, working with Center for Healthy Minds Core Faculty Dr. Simon Goldberg. Her research focuses on meditation-based interventions, including methods to increase user engagement, adverse experiences that arise during practice, and the effects of meditation on close relationships. She is currently running a large clinical trial of the Healthy Minds Program with romantic couples, examining how meditation may support flourishing in relationships and impact the wellbeing of non-meditating partners.
She has been practicing meditation for over a decade and spent three years living at the Cambridge Zen Center, where she ran meditation groups for young adults and for incarcerated women. She is a certified teacher and trainer with Unified Mindfulness, where she completed 420 hours of mindfulness coach training and has co-facilitated meditation retreats. At UW–Madison, she received an Arts for Healthy Minds grant to create mindful movement workshops for the campus community, and she has trained Student Flourishing Ambassadors (who are part of the Student Flourishing Initiative at CHM) to lead guided meditation practices on campus. In her clinical work, Lily uses interventions that incorporate mindfulness and draw on Buddhist philosophy, such as dialectical behavior therapy.
Before graduate school, Lily worked in basic neuroscience research and on clinical trials of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.
