Judson Brewer

Dr. Jud is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences at the School of Public Health and Psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University, as well as a research affiliate at MIT. Before that, he held research and teaching positions at Yale University and the University of Massachusetts’ Center for Mindfulness. Read more about his research here.

Jud Brewer MD PhD (“Dr. Jud”) is a New York Times best-selling author and thought leader in the field of habit change and the “science of self-mastery,” having combined over 25 years of experience with mindfulness training with his scientific research. As an addiction psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for treating addictions, Dr. Jud has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change, including both in-person and app-based treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety (Eat Right Now, Unwinding Anxiety and Craving to Quit).

Based on the success of these programs in the lab, he co-founded MindSciences, Inc. to create app-based digital therapeutic versions of these programs for a wider audience, working with individuals, corporations, and hospital systems to put effective, evidence-based behavior change guidance in the hands of people struggling with unwanted behaviors and “everyday addictions.”

Dr. Jud has also studied the underlying neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI and EEG neurofeedback, adding to the understanding of the brain’s “Default Mode Network” and the role of the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) in self-referential thinking. He regularly gives talks on the intersection of modern science and ancient meditative practices, helping to expose a modern audience to specific techniques and insights first discovered 2,500 years ago.

He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, trained US Olympic athletes and coaches, foreign government ministers and corporate leaders. His work has been featured on 60 Minutes, TED (4th most viewed talk of 2016, with 15+ Million views), Time magazine (top 100 new health discoveries of 2013), Forbes, CNN, BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera (documentary about his research), The Washington Post, Businessweek and others.

His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and American Heart Association, among others.

He is the author of The Craving Mind: from cigarettes to smartphones to love, why we get hooked and how we can break bad habits (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) and the New York Times best-seller, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2021). .