Judson Brewer

Jud Brewer MD PhD (“Dr. Jud”) is a New York Times best-selling author and thought leader in the field of habit change and the “science of self-mastery," having combined more than 25 years of experience with mindfulness training with his scientific research therein. He is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences and Psychiatry at the Schools of Public Health & Medicine at Brown University. A psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for addictions, Brewer has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change, including both in-person and app-based treatments for smoking, emotional eating and anxiety. He has also studied the underlying neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI and EEG neurofeedback. He has trained US Olympic athletes and coaches, foreign government ministers, and his work has been featured on 60 Minutes, TED, The New York Times, Time Magazine (top 100 new health discoveries of 2013), Forbes, BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera (documentary about his research), Businessweek and others. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, American Heart Association, among others.

Brewer founded MindSciences (which merged with Sharecare Inc. in 2020) to move his discoveries of clinical evidence mindfulness for anxiety, eating, smoking and other behavior change into the hands of consumers. He also cofounded Mindshift Recovery, a non-profit organization to help people who suffer from addiction, and College Journey.AI, which helps high school students navigate the stress of the college application process. He is the author of The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love – Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), the New York Times best-seller, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2021) and the forthcoming book The Hunger Habit: Why We Eat When We’re Not Hungry and How to Stop (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2024).