Board of Directors
Julia Keller – Executive Director
Julia has 20 years of experience working with children who have learning disabilities as both an educator and a researcher. She has been the Principal Investigator on four school-based intervention studies looking at the impact of mindfulness training on the development of attention, working memory, emotion regulation, and academic progress in elementary students. She is the author of Mindful Interventions in Special Education, a book that helps educators develop their intervention toolkit. She is passionate about helping young people find ways to be more mindful, joyful, creative, compassionate, generous, and productive at school and at home. She is an expert on stress management for kids; for more information go to her website: drjuliakeller.com. Julia received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of New Mexico. Contact Julia at julia @ mindfulyouthinstitute.org.
Patrick Keller – President
Patrick has fifteen years of experience working in K-12 public schools—as an English teacher, a library/media specialist, and a journalism instructor. Patrick also has two years of experience as a professor, instructing undergraduate and graduate students in pedagogy, systems thinking, educational technology, designing of training, educational psychology, assessment, information literacy, and the production and utilization of teaching materials. Patrick completed his Ph.D. in Organization, Information, and Learning Sciences from the University of New Mexico with emphases in distance education, instructional design, information literacy, and gamification in education. Contact Patrick at patrick @ mindfulyouthinstitute.org.
Advisory Board
David Witherington
David is an Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico. His research focuses on the study of emotional and cognitive development in infants and preschoolers, as well as on the study of perceptual-motor development in infancy. David received his Ph.D. in developmental science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1998 and subsequently completed a 4 year postdoctoral position at the University of Virginia before arriving at the University of New Mexico in 2002.