Nazareth Castellanos

Nazareth Castellanos is a neuroscientist who studies the brain and the body, with a particular focus on the neuroscience of meditation. She holds a degree in theoretical physics and a doctorate in Neuroscience from the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is research director of the Nirakara laboratory, part of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid's extraordinary chair in Mindfulness and cognitive science.

She teaches through online courses, many of them recorded so people can follow them at their own pace. Her flagship course, El Cerebro como Aliado, runs live over several months. It moves through brain anatomy and function, attention and mind-wandering, meditation, emotion, memory, the neuroscience of the body, attachment, the gut microbiota, breathing and the heart. Other courses include La respiración, el corazón y el cerebro, Neurociencia de la danza and Coherencia emocional: de la neurociencia a la práctica.

She also writes books that bring the findings of meditation neuroscience to general readers, including children's stories for younger ones. Her YouTube channel gathers talks and short videos on body neuroscience, brain-body interaction, the neuroscience of meditation and the neuroscience of Chikung (QiGong).