Monas&c Graduates Program

(8 – 28 October, 2023)

This program is offered to senior monastics who have completed their formal monastic learning and are well-prepared to be trained as educational leaders in their respective monastic communities. We have 32 participants this year, with 24 of them being monks and 8 nuns from various monasteries and nunneries. The program started on October 8 and ended on October 28, 2023. During the three-week intensive training, the participants were introduced to basic science learning, which included a lot of hands-on activities to refine their learning. And a designated time is given priority for writing exercises to reflect on and summarize what they have learned in the class.
For the first week, staff from the science department of LTWA took over the class. Tsewang Rinzin, Trinlay Wangdue and Tenzin Paldon taught biology while incorporating various activities for effective and engaging learning in the class. And also, Karma Thupten provided a few lectures on brain anatomy and how the brain functions.
During the second week, Sonal Thorve took a physics class. Her profession involves being an astronomer, STEM teacher educator, and science writer. She opted for basic physics topics such as force, types of motion, air pressure, sound, light, and magnetism for a week. A comprehensive explanation of all of these topics was provided through hands-on activities. She managed to make learning physics both easy and interesting. Post-lunch sessions were supervised by staff from the Science Department of the LTWA. They continued the lesson from the first week, and they also took a few classes on the human body system.
During the third week, Mr. David E. Presti started off his class with an introduction to the history of modern science and its scientific revolution. His primary topic of discussion in the class was the world of our senses. He spoke about the senses from scientific perspectives while discussing with monks and nuns about the Buddhist perspective on each sense. In a nutshell, the class learned about brain anatomy and its function at the same time. The one-week class ended with a series of intense discussions and new learnings.
Mr. Rabga, who is an atomic physicist, aWended a one-hour class on quantum physics aYer lunch. For a week, they had the opportunity to gain a comprehensive understanding of quantum physics at the most fundamental level.

Prof. David E Presti

He teaches teaches biology, psychology, and cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been on the faculty in molecular and cell biology for more than 30 years. For more than a decade he worked in the clinical treatment of addiction and of post-traumatic-stress disorder at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center in San Francisco. And since 2003, he have been teaching neuroscience and conversing about science with Tibetan Buddhist monastics in India, Bhutan, and Nepal. He has doctorates in molecular biology from Caltech and in clinical psychology from the University of Oregon. His areas of expertise include human neurobiology and psychopharmacology, psychedelics, and expanding the paradigm for
the scientific study of mind.