David Scott Mathieson is the senior researcher on Myanmar/Burma in the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch.

Karma Lekshe Tsomo is a lecturer in the department of religion and ancient civilizations at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research interests include women in Buddhism, death and identity, Buddhist feminist ethics, Buddhism and bioethics, Buddhist social ethics and Buddhist transnationalism.

Les Green is professor of the philosophy of law at Balliol College, Oxford. He is working on a book about “right speech” and argues that Buddhist ideas about avoiding divisive, abusive and false speech can help us live together well in free societies.

Human Rights Watch published a 99-page report in 2009 titled “The Resistance of the Monks: Buddhism and Protest in Burma.” The report, also available in Burmese, describes the repression Myanmar’s monks experienced after they led demonstrations against the government in September 2007. It tells the stories of individual monks who were arrested, beaten and detained.

Master Uy, a Buddhist monk in El Monte, California, escaped Communist Vietnam in 1990. He is one of the so-called, “Boat People,” a group of some 2 million refugees who fled Vietnam from the time of the fall of Saigon in 1976 until the mid-1990s. Approximately 800,000 of those refugees settled in the United States, […]

Clifford Saron is a research scientist at the University of California, Davis’ Center for Mind and Brain. He studies the effects of long-term meditation on the brain.

Lobsang Tenzin Negi is the founder and director of Drepung Loseling Monastery in  Atlanta. He directs the Emory-Tibet Partnership, which focuses on Buddhist meditation and science. He is an expert on Tibetan Buddhism and meditation.

Katrina Lantos Swett is the chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice. She is an expert on religious freedom and human rights issues around the world.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde is a pastoral counselor in Atlanta and a graduate of Spirit Rock Meditation Center’s Community Dharma Leader Program, as well as a Buddhist chaplain. She is the author of Vigil: Spiritual Reflections on Your Money and Sanity. She is an expert on Buddhist meditation.