Space Zero · Who

Holding the Vision

Rendering the Invisible

Yen Chen

Founder and Executive Director

Yen is the Founder and Executive Director of Space Zero and has an aptitude for holding multiple perspectives simultaneously. Over the past decade she has initiated and led projects in China, Vancouver, San Francisco and New York; creating spaces that support personal and professional growth for entrepreneurs and innovators.

She holds a Master's in Integral Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and has received intensive training in somatic leadership, growth-edge coaching, ecosystem leadership, and public leadership. A longtime meditator and dedicated practitioner, Yen has walked a deep spiritual path, working closely with some of the world's leading wisdom teachers.

At Space Zero, she carries that same instinct to lead, empower, and enable projects to move from Zero to One.

Board Members and Strategic Advisors

Building Traction

Adam Goldstein

Chairman

Adam is Chairman of Space Zero. Previously he co-founded the travel site Hipmunk (acquired by SAP Concur in 2016) after studying electrical and mechanical engineering at MIT. He went on to become a Visiting Scientist at Michael Levin's lab at Tufts, then a graduate student in Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics at Oxford. He has spent his time since then starting co-founding various companies in the field of alignment, including Softmax and a stealth science lab.

Chris Zobrist

Nurturing a Relational Field

Chris is a social entrepreneur, ecosystem builder, and relational healer based in California. He has more than twenty years of experience supporting early-stage startups, and recently completed a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership at USC. His meditation practice spans over sixty weeks of intensive retreat with teachers including Jon Kabat-Zinn, Shinzen Young, Daniel P. Brown, Joseph Goldstein, and Mingyur Rinpoche. At Space Zero, his ecosystem instincts and depth of practice anchor both the Strategy/Operations and Ecosystem Collaboration work on the ground — tending the relationships through which flourishing travels between individuals, teams, and communities rather than concentrating in any one.

Bill Duane

Navigating Complexity

Drawing on twelve years at Google, including creating the global role of Superintendent of Wellbeing, and a decade of consulting across healthcare, finance, technology, and media, Bill brings rare breadth to the work of transformation.

He has taught innovation at Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and serves as Director of Strategy and Implementation at the Center for the Study of Apparent Selves, working on applied AI ethics through a Buddhist lens. His practice weaves neuroscience, complexity theory, integral theory, and mindfulness, enabling individuals and organizations to move skillfully through a world changing faster than our maps of it.

At Space Zero, Bill brings his rare synthesis of contemplative depth, organizational intelligence, and frontier technology to the questions at the heart of our work.

Advisory Board

Contemplative Practice & Human-AI

Cultivating wisdom and relational evolution

Shinzen Young

Teacher and researcher at the intersection of meditation and science

Shinzen is a world-renowned meditation teacher, neuroscience research consultant, and expert at the intersection of mysticism, mathematics, and category theory. His systematic approach to meditation, known as Unified Mindfulness, has led to collaborations with Harvard Medical School, Carnegie-Mellon University, and the University of Vermont. He also serves as the co-director of the Science Enhanced Mindful Awareness (SEMA) Lab at the University of Arizona.

As the author of The Science of Enlightenment, Shinzen leads a life of continuous creation. Having written extensively on the concept of “Zero,” he will be joining Space Zero to offer deep wisdom on cultivating the source of creativity and insight.

Sessei Meg McNeil

Zen priest bridging ancient lineage and modern technology

Meg has practised Soto Zen for over thirty years and received ordination as a Zen priest from Tenshin Reb Anderson in 2003. Since 2022 she has been Head Priest of Stone Creek Zen Center in Sebastopol. Alongside her Zen practice, she was a founding member of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute at Google, training hundreds of mindfulness teachers internationally. At Space Zero, her steadiness in the Zen lineage is part of what makes embodied transmission (the slow shaping of a place by daily practice) possible here.

Peter Hershock

Intercultural philosopher bringing Buddhist wisdom to AI ethics

Peter is an intercultural philosopher who draws on Buddhist conceptual resources to address contemporary global issues, with a focus on equity, diversity, and the ethics of emerging technologies. He directs the Asian Studies Development Program and helped launch the Humane Artificial Intelligence Initiative at the East-West Center in Honolulu. He holds a Ph.D. in Asian and Comparative Philosophy from the University of Hawai‘i, and is the author of more than a dozen books, most recently Consciousness Mattering: A Buddhist Synthesis. At Space Zero, he brings the long arc of Buddhist thought to the question of how humans, AI, and the more-than-human can come into a future worth wanting.

Paul Colognese

AI Alignment Researcher · Center for the Study of Apparent Selves

Paul is an AI safety researcher studying the development of artificial minds and how to ensure the minds we build are ultimately good and wise. At the Center for the Study of Apparent Selves, he is exploring whether Buddhist frameworks can be applied to this question. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics, has built AI evaluations for Anthropic and the UK AI Security Institute, and co-founded the London Institute for Safe AI. At Space Zero, his enquiry into AI and Buddhist thought on care and wisdom belongs at the centre of the Emergent Gathering: a serious technical question about whether what we build next can carry care as part of its structure.

Advisory Board

Embodied Science

Finding Form in Life, Knowledge and Beauty

Sara Lazar

Associate Professor · Harvard Medical School · Mass General

Sara is an Associate Professor in Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Her lab uses MRI to investigate the neuroplastic changes that follow mindfulness and yoga practice, and how those changes correlate with reductions in stress, anxiety, and chronic pain. She is among the world's leading researchers on the neuroscience of meditation, and her recent work explores the intersection of meditation, adult development, and virtue. At Space Zero, her work meets Lab Zero's central enquiry: that what unfolds in the body during sustained practice is not metaphor, but measurable change in the substrate of a life.

Michael Levin

Director · Allen Discovery Center, Tufts University

Michael is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts, Director of the Allen Discovery Center, and Associate Faculty at Harvard's Wyss Institute. He is also a member of the Centre for the Study of Apparent Selves (CSAS). His research sits at the interface of developmental biology, cognitive science, and computer science, discovering how bioelectric signals coordinate cells into the collective intelligence that builds and regenerates anatomy. He is known for creating the first molecular tools for reading and writing the natural bioelectric pattern memories that guide growth and form, the co-creation of Xenobots, and a body of work that has reframed how we think about cognition in a wide range of embodiments. For Space Zero, Michael's work represents the global frontier for adaptive systems and regenerative processes.

Kati Devaney

Contemplative neuroscientist · Harvard · UC Berkeley

Kati is a contemplative neuroscientist and meditation practitioner with more than twenty years of practice. She earned her Ph.D. using fMRI to study attention and prediction updating in experienced Vipassana meditators, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. She is currently a researcher at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, co-founder of The Berkeley Alembic, and Chief Science Officer of Jhourney.

At Space Zero, she embodies the figure Lab Zero is built around: a researcher whose science is rooted in decades of practice, where the laboratory and the cushion are the same inquiry.

Adam Safron

Independent Researcher · Allen Discovery Center, Tufts

Adam is an independent researcher whose work spans diverse topics ranging from the computational neuroscience of emotion, meditation, sexuality, psychedelics, consciousness, agency, biologically-inspired artificial intelligence, and AI alignment. He is the author of Integrated World Modeling Theory, which uses the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference framework to combine insights from multiple theories of consciousness. He currently works with Michael Levin at the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts, and has held appointments at Johns Hopkins, Indiana University, and the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies. He is currently organizing a Royal Society special issue on agency and self-world models in natural and artificial intelligences, and is preparing an online symposium and conference series to promote expert conversations on AI capabilities and alignment. He is also developing a formal theory of love that he believes may hold solutions to alignment problems for both human and non-human sentient beings. At Space Zero, his framework gives Lab Zero a shared scientific grammar for the question that runs beneath the work: how attention, prediction, and presence give rise to the felt sense of being alive.

Curators

Weaving Conditions for Future Flourishing

Alexander Sabine

Creative Education

Alexander is a UK-based interdisciplinary consultant with over 20 years experience in education and academia. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Active Inference Institute. He is committed to scientific democratisation, building bridges between cutting-edge research and experiential learning. Alexander leads the creative-education work through which the deeper currents of the place (science, contemplation, and the questions that matter) become genuinely encounterable.

Amelia Thomley

Program Development

Amelia Thomley is an artist, art therapist, and community facilitator whose work explores how creative, contemplative, and relational experiences can strengthen selfhood, cultivate shared meaning, and foster belonging. Drawing from years of work with scientists, elders, caregivers, and mission-driven organizations, she helps shape the programs and culture of Space Zero, bridging art, science, and spirituality. She works across initiatives to strengthen communication, build collaborative partnerships, and help people and ideas connect across disciplines.

Sam Gorman

Animateur

Sam Gorman has been practicing meditation since 2010, when he attended his first retreat as a teenager. Since then, he has been deeply engaged in creating, supporting, and facilitating immersive, transformational educational programs rooted in spiritual awakening and experiential learning.

He is the creator of the World CitiZen summer camp for youth in China, served as Director of the month-long Woodenfish Monastic Life Program, and founded the Seattle Urban Monastery residential practice program. Across these roles, Sam focuses on supporting the conditions for awareness, insight, and meaningful connection to unfold in ways that are both beautiful and sustainable.

Sam has received training in mindfulness facilitation through UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center, Aletheia coaching, and Pacific Integral's Emergent Facilitation Program. Sam enjoys drinking tea, camping in the wilderness, playing guitar, and spending time with family and friends.

Those gathered around the work