Kathryn (Kati) Devaney is a neuroscientist and dedicated meditation practitioner.

With more than 20 years of meditation experience, Kati has practiced on retreats across the US, Europe, and India. She has also collected behavioral and neuroimaging data from meditators across several retreats, events, and laboratories. Supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, she earned her PhD in 2018, using fMRI to examine attention and prediction updating in experienced Vipassana meditators.

After completing her postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, Kati moved to Berkeley CA. She is currently the Chief Scientific Officer for the The Consciousness Foundation.

Kati is honored to serve on the boards of the Open Dharma Foundation, which provides scholarships for meditation retreats, and the Women’s Visionary Council, which connects the wisdom of psychedelic elders with the next generation.

From 2022 to 2025, Kati served as a co-founder, board member, and the founding Executive Director of The Berkeley Alembic, a science advisor at Jhourney.io, and a researcher at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

Previously, she co-founded the SF Dharma Collective and served as its board president, designed and taught her course ‘Meditation and the Brain’ at Stanford, taught Cognitive Psychology at Boston University, and has given lectures at universities including MIT, Harvard University, and IIT Delhi.

Kati has been quoted discussing the neuroscience of meditation in The Atlantic, National Geographic, TIME Magazine, and Women’s Health.

Kati currently has a waitlist for new meditation students - you can inquire via the contact form.