Instructor

Lauray MacElhern has spent her career cooking, studying, and experimenting with healing foods — working alongside physicians, dietitians, and chefs to teach healing cooking classes at hospitals, cancer centers, universities, and academic health centers.

As Managing Director of the UC San Diego Centers for Integrative Health, she oversees the business administration, strategy, operations, marketing, finance, management, and development of its five Centers: the Center for Integrative Medicine, Center for Mindfulness, Krupp Center for Integrative Research, Center for Integrative Education, and Center for Integrative Nutrition. One of the founding members of the Centers for Integrative Health in 2011, Lauray has supported its growth from a 10-person micro-granted program into a nearly 100-person, multi-Center organization.

In her role co-directing the Center for Integrative Nutrition, Lauray brings deep expertise in curriculum development. She is co-founder, teacher, and trainer of the UC San Diego Natural Healing & Cooking Program and co-developer of the UC San Diego Certificate in Integrative Nutrition: Food As Medicine. She serves on the boards of the Krupp Endowed Fund and of the prestigious Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health.

Lauray joined UC San Diego after running The Cancer Project, a Washington, D.C.–based non-profit dedicated to nutrition education and research for cancer prevention and survival. There she worked with and trained more than 100 chefs around the world to teach the organization's award-winning cooking and nutrition courses, reaching millions through public outreach and within community centers, hospitals, and medical centers in more than 160 cities across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Panama, Jamaica, India, and Spain. For the prior decade, she held technology, management, marketing, and leadership roles contributing to the start-up and growth of three companies, earning formal recognition from NASA and the Telly Awards for her work.

From an early age, Lauray has been personally immersed in and passionate about healing cooking, natural medicine, Ayurveda, and Chinese medicine. She earned her bachelor's degree in communication and commerce through coursework in the Wharton School and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and pursued advanced coursework in nutrition sciences through extension programs at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, and American University. She earned her MBA from the Rady School of Management, where she was a recipient of the Pauline Foster MBA Fellowship.

Cassandra Vieten is Clinical Professor and Director of the Center for Mindfulness at the Centers for Integrative Health in the Department of Family Medicine at UC San Diego. She is also Director of Research at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination and Clinical Psychology Director at the Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative at UCSD. She is Senior Advisor of the John W. Brick Mental Health Foundation where she served as Executive Director from 2019-2023, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where she served as President from 2013-2019.

Her research has focused on spirituality and health, transformative experiences and practices, the development of mindfulness-based interventions for emotional well-being, and development of media technologies to inspire awe. She received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and completed her research training in behavioral genetics at UC San Francisco. She has authored three books, published numerous articles in scientific journals, and is an internationally recognized keynote speaker and workshop leader.