Courtesy University of Pennsylvania

Michael Baime, M.D., of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania,is the Director of the Penn Program for Mindfulness and the Director of Mind-Body Programs for the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania Health System. He founded the Penn Program for Mindfulness in 1992, and since then the program has trained more than 11,000 individuals in a structured eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course.

Dr. Baime began practicing meditation at the age of eight. He was authorized to teach Buddhism and meditation by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa in 1983. He is currently a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Dr. Baime has been the recipient of the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Appel award for work in psychiatry in the School of Medicine.

He has developed and taught numerous courses at Penn, including a one-month medical school elective “Spirituality and Medicine,” offered in collaboration with the Department of Pastoral Care; an annual Mindfulness-Based Stress Management course for medical and nursing students; a Department of Psychology course, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Meditation” taught jointly with Amishi P. Jha, PhD.; and additional courses in the Graduate School of Education, the Graduate School of Social Work, and the Department of Psychiatry.

He has done research on mindfulness and meditation in a variety of areas, including the effect of meditation on working memory and attention; the application of mindfulness to behavioral and medical illnesses, including obesity and substance abuse; the effect of mindfulness training on mood and spirituality; the relationship between stress and health care costs; and the impact of mindfulness on empathy, burnout and mood for health care workers in a hospital setting.