UC San Diego

Mariana is a certified Mindfulness Instructor for kids and teens. She took a mentoring and certification training program at the UCSD Center for Mindfulness. She also completed an intensive teacher training in the Mindfulness in Schools Education Project (MiSP .b program), a program launched in the UK, having obtained a certification to teach this dynamic, classroom-based program to middle and high school students. She is currently working to become certified to teach the Making Friends with Yourself Program, which is a Self-Compassion curriculum for teens based on the ideas and research of Kristen Neff and Christopher Germer taught at the Center for Self-Compassion. Since 2015, she has been working with the Youth and Family Programs Division at the UCSD Center for Mindfulness.

At this time, Mariana provides support in Mindful and Compassionate Parenting Workshops and will start offering training on this to parents in Mexico. Mariana strongly believes in the power of Mindfulness. This has inspired her to concentrate her studies on helping children and teens develop self-regulation, resilience and social-emotional skills that they can use for the rest of their lives. Her passion for teaching children and teens has inspired her to pursue further training in the Little Flower Yoga Program. This also motivated her to start a Stress Reduction Program where she applies her knowledge to teach in economically underdeveloped areas in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she has been teaching a multiage group of teens and pre-teens.

Mariana is a multicultural woman. She spent eight years living in Europe. This has helped her better understand how different societies work. Her native language is Spanish and she also speaks English, French and German. She spends her free time traveling and producing wine at her vineyards in Ensenada, Mexico with her husband.

Megan Prager, MA, serves as the Compassion Programs Director at the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness and is the co-founder of Mindful Labs. She is a certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher, a certified Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) teacher, and a certified Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) instructor. Megan is also an adjunct faculty member at San Diego State University and a lecturer at the UC San Diego Rady School of Management.

In addition to teaching mindfulness-based programs, Megan specializes in designing and delivering mindfulness and compassion trainings for Fortune 500 companies as well as for educational, healthcare, and academic settings. She currently collaborates with universities to develop and teach mindfulness and compassion courses at the collegiate level. Across all of her work, Megan is driven by a clear mission: to empower individuals to cultivate compassionate awareness and recognize their capacity to shape their own well-being.

Helen Hyun-Chung Kim is a Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy teacher. In her previous life she was a board-certified psychiatrist in Korea for 15 years, serving underserved communities. During that time she witnessed profound suffering in her patients and felt drawn toward mindfulness and self-compassion as paths toward healing.

With guidance from founding director Dr. Steve Hickman, Helen joined UC San Diego’s Center for Mindfulness, where she studied a range of mindfulness-based programs with many respected teachers. Through this journey she developed a grounded foundation rooted in awareness, acceptance, ease, and compassion.

Helen is committed to sharing what she has learned with others on their own paths of healing and self-discovery, offering a warm, steady presence shaped by both clinical experience and contemplative practice.

Cheryl has over 20 years of finance and corporate experience in leadership roles, working in a high-demanding career while raising two daughters. The daily stress she faced led her to conclude there must be a better way to live and work. She witnessed firsthand the negative impacts of long work hours, stress, and pressure on individuals and the emotional and mental pain suffered in the workplace.

Her extensive professional background informs her teaching, making her an accessible and compassionate guide who translates mindfulness and compassion into language that feels relevant and practical.

Cheryl first discovered meditation in college when her wandering mind created difficulties in her studies. She later learned about mindfulness through Mindful Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in 2005 and pursued Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) in 2010. She attended a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat in Joshua Tree in 2013 and continues retreat practice annually.

She embodies mindfulness and self-compassion through daily practice, emphasizing the power of pausing to respond with intention. Cheryl ultimately left her finance career to launch Simply Pause, supporting others in changing their relationship with stress and cultivating wiser, more compassionate lives.

Dr. Rabin is a Professor and Founding Faculty at the UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science, the Co-Director of the UC San Diego Dissemination and Implementation Science Center (DISC), and an Implementation Science (IS) expert on a number of large NIH and VA Center grants and research projects including the VA San Diego Center of Excellence for Stress and Mental Health. 

Dr. Rabin has extensive expertise in the selection and operationalization of IS models and she is a national expert in the use of the RE-AIM framework and its contextually expanded counterpart, PRISM. Dr. Rabin has been a member of the national leadership team for RE-AIM for the past close to one decade, developed and refined advanced methodology for the use of RE-AIM and PRISM across diverse topic areas and settings, and developed training and conducted consultations on the operationalization of RE-AIM and PRISM for research proposals and ongoing projects. 

Dr. Rabin also has substantial expertise and track record in contributing to capacity building for IS. She has developed and contributed to national IS workshops and trainings, developed webtools for researchers and clinicians including one of the most widely used webtool for IS, the D&I Models in Health Research webtool (www.dissemination-implementation.org). Dr. Rabin has developed and is teaching (and co-teaching) doctoral courses in IS both at UC San Diego and the University of Colorado. She co-founded and serves as a co-Director for the fully online ACCORDS D&I Science Graduate Certificate Program. She also has extensive experience with consulting and coaching in IS both early and mid-career researchers through her role as an Implementation Scientist for the ACCORDS D&I Program at CU and more recently at the UC San Diego Dissemination and Implementation Science Center. 

Dr. Rabin also brings substantial expertise in the IS measurement area. She co-led the development of the D&I Workspace on the NIH Grid-enabled Measures Database, creating a platform for sharing IS measures and their metadata broadly. She also co-led the development of a review of existing measurement databases for IS and continues to contribute to IS data harmonization activities through her role in the Methods Workgroup on the Colorado Implementation Science Center for Cancer Control (one of seven IS centers funded through NCI). Dr. Rabin has wide-ranging experience providing training and IS consultation for diverse implementation projects.

Hemal Patel is a Co-Investigator on the UCSD REACH Center, and also one of our amazing faculty members. He is a Veterans Administration (VA) Research Career Scientist whose expertise lies at the intersection of caveolin and mitochondrial biology. Over the course of his career, he has applied this foundational science to the study of cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, aging, diabetes, and cancer — and in recent years, has expanded his work to include direct collaboration with clinical groups, bringing rigorous basic science methods into translational research contexts.

Dr. Patel is funded by the NIH, the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and other agencies. He serves on editorial boards for scientific journals and reviews grants for major funding bodies including the NIH and NASA. With more than 140 publications and a regular presence at international conferences, he is a highly active contributor to the broader scientific community.

Most recently, Dr. Patel has been leading efforts to accelerate research on meditation in collaboration with the InnerScience Research Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to funding studies on the biological and physical effects of meditation on the human body. This work brings together his deep scientific expertise and his personal commitment to understanding whole-person health.