Jamil Zaki earned his degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from Boston University, obtained a Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Center for Brain Science. He is currently a professor of Psychology and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, where he has become an international authority on empathy, which he describes not as an innate trait but as one that can be trained through practices ranging from meditation to compassionate attention to others.