David Saunders, MD, PhD

David Saunders, MD, PhD attended Boston College as an undergraduate, majoring in theology. He spent four months living in a Tibetan refugee community in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he studied the history and philosophy of Tibetan Buddhism. After graduating from Boston College in 2007, David returned to the same Tibetan community in Nepal as a Fulbright Scholar, studying Tibetan religio-cultural perceptions of tuberculosis, which confirmed his desire to pursue a PhD in Buddhist studies alongside medical training. From 2008 to 2015, he matriculated at Weill Cornell Medical School (WCMC) and obtained a PhD in Religion at Emory University under John Dunne, with a specific focus on Buddhist meditation theory and the philosophy of mind and self. For the last several years, he has taught mindfulness and compassion-based meditation in various settings—especially enjoying his time with children and teenagers. He is presently a clinical and research fellow in the Albert J. Solnit Integrated Training Program at the Yale Child Study Center at Yale University. He is currently running a small clinical trial of a novel mindfulness-based intervention for elementary school children with ADHD under the mentorship of Hedy Kober.