Dr. Judson Brewer

Dr. Jud is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University, as well as a research affiliate at MIT. Before that, he held research and teaching positions at Yale University and the University of Massachusetts’ Center for Mindfulness.

As an addiction psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for treating addictions, Dr. Jud has developed and tested mindfulness programs for habit changes and studied the underlying neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI and EEG neurofeedback. He regularly gives talks on the intersection of modern science and ancient meditative practices, helping to expose a modern audience to specific techniques and insights first discovered 2,500 years ago.

He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, trained US Olympic coaches, and his work has been featured on 60 Minutes, TED (4th most viewed talk of 2016, with 10+ Million views), Time magazine (top 100 new health discoveries of 2013), Forbes, BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera (documentary about his research), Businessweek and others.

His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and American Heart Association, among others.

Dr. Brewer is the author of The Craving Mind: from cigarettes to smartphones to love, why we get hooked and how we can break bad habits (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) and Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2021).