Faculty Bio

Saki F. Santorelli is Executive Director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society and an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He has been the Director of the renowned Stress Reduction Clinic since 1996 and has made pioneering advances in Mind-Body and Integrative Medicine, through the clinical application of meditation and mindfulness in contemporary medical and health care settings.

Dr. Santorelli has co-authored scientific papers on the clinical application of mindfulness and has written a number of articles and monographs on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) that specifically address MBSR teacher formation, competency, and readiness. He has directed particular attention to the development of self-knowledge and the education of the inner life of health care professionals and, in turn, to understanding and articulating the dynamics of the patient-practitioner relationship. Likewise, he has written and presented about the converging roles of medicine and mindfulness in the relief of suffering and the innate ability of medical patients to learn how to more effectively care for themselves through training in mindfulness practices. His book, Heal Thy Self: Lessons on Mindfulness in Medicine explores, in detail, the confluence of these multiple areas of inquiry.

An active clinician since 1980, Dr Santorelli has worked with thousands of medical patients and has educated and helped mentor a generation of practitioners of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) participating in training programs within the UMMS Stress Reduction Program. As an educator, he has trained leaders and innovators in the private and public sectors, prison inmates and correctional facilities staff, clergy, and thousands of health care professionals in the US and internationally. Since 1987 he has engaged in the creation and delivery of innovative programs in academic medical education. A teacher for more than three decades, he has taught in every phase of education from pre-K to graduate school with a particular focus on the application and integration of mind-body and mental training approaches in contemporary educational settings and subject areas.

During his tenure as Executive Director, he has, with his colleagues, established Oasis - an international learning center for education, training and leadership in MBSR and other mindfulness-based interventions, developed a comprehensive professional education, training and certification program in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and initiated an annual international scientific conference focused on mindfulness-based clinical care, research and education. Additionally, the Center for Mindfulness has also implemented a wide-range of innovative "crossover" programs and services designed to make mindfulness more accessible to organizations, institutions, and governmental agencies outside of medicine and health care, including ground-breaking efforts in the integration of mindfulness into mainstream public education.

Dr. Santorelli is a founding member and an elected Executive Committee member of the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine and is a Fellow of the Fetzer Institute. He has been a visiting professor at McGill University Medical School and is the Lydia Rapport Visiting Professor at the Smith College graduate school of social work in the summer of 2005. He recently served on a national panel convened by the Pfizer Corporation examining the Anatomy of Stress. He is an internationally-recognized lecturer and workshop presenter.