Daniel Aitken
Daniel is an experienced marketing professional with over a decade of insights gathered from corporate and consumer marketing executive roles working for multinationals such as Canon, and large financial firms such as Westpac. While pursuing his marketing career, Daniel continued to foster his life long interest in Tibetan Buddhism, the Tibetan language, and its literature. This has taken him across Australia, America, India, Nepal, and Tibet to pursue a deeper understanding of Buddhist theory and practice with masters from the living tradition. Daniel also reads Sanskrit and Tibetan and has a PhD in Buddhist Philosophy. He is currently a Publisher at Wisdom Publications.
Daniel Aitken
Marcus Bingenheimer
Marcus Bingenheimer is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Temple University. He is a scholar of Buddhist Studies specializing in the history and literature of China and East Asia, often by using digital datasets and computational methods. He obtained an MA (Sinology) and Dr. phil (History of Religions) from Würzburg University and an MA (Communication Studies) from Nagoya University. His main research interests are the history of Buddhism in East Asia and early Buddhist sūtra literature. At Temple University he is also Academic Director of the Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio where he helps to coordinate support for emerging digital scholarship technologies, such as Digital Humanities & Arts methods, 3D printing, or the use of VR-environments.
Marcus Bingenheimer
John Canti
John Canti is Editorial Chair and Director of 84000, a global nonprofit organization dedicated to translating all of the Buddha's words into modern languages, and to making them freely available to everyone, everywhere. Throughout his career, John has devoted himself to producing lucid, accurate translations of Buddhist texts and teachings for the benefit of all. He is a founding member of the Padmakara Translation Group, which has the principal aim of preserving and communicating major classic and contemporary Buddhist texts through translation into French, English, German and Spanish. John has completed two three-year retreats at Chanteloube, France (1980-1985, 1986-1989), and was awarded the 2016 Khyentse Fellowship. John joined the BDRC Board of Directors in 2017.
John Canti
Lauran Hartley
Lauran Hartley (PhD, Indiana University) is Tibetan Studies Librarian for the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University and occasionally serves as Adjunct Lecturer in Tibetan Literature for the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. She has also taught courses on Tibetan literature and religion at Indiana and Rutgers universities. In addition to co-editing the book Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change (Duke University Press, 2008) and serving as Inner Asian Book Review Editor for the Journal of Asian Studies, she has also published several literary translations and articles on Tibetan intellectual history and discourse from the eighteenth century to the present. Since joining Columbia full-time in 2007, and as co-founder of the Tibetan Resources Working Group, Lauran has worked especially to revise the Library of Congress Tibetan Romanization Table, assist in coordinating Tibetan Studies metadata practices, and initiate Tibetan archival and digital preservation projects. She also jointly serves the University of Toronto Libraries through a cooperative agreement.
Lauran Hartley
Huanhuan He
Zhejiang University
Professor He specializes in Buddhist Studies, Indian Philosophy, and Tibetan Studies. She recently completed a stay with Harvard-Yenching Institute from January 2014 to October 2014. Her recent publications include, A Study of the Madhyamakahṛdayakārikā and the Tarkajvālā 中观心论>及其古注<思择焰>研究, China Social Sciences Press 中国社会科学出版社, 2013, two volumes, 831 pages.
Huanhuan He
Lama Jabb (མདའ་ཚན་བླ་མ་སྐྱབས༏)
Lama Jabb was born and brought up in the Dhatsen tribe, a nomadic community in Northeastern Tibet. He studied in Tibet, India and the UK and received his D.Phil at the University of Oxford. He is currently a Supernumerary Fellow in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies and the Head of the Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Centre at Wolfson College, and Instructor in Tibetan at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.
Lama Jabb's research and writing centre on the interplay between the Tibetan literary text and oral traditions, literary criticism, translation theory and practice, and contemporary Tibet. He is the author of the book Oral and Literary Continuities in Modern Tibetan Literature: The Inescapable Nation (2015) and many articles including "The Wandering Voice of Tibet: Life and Songs of Dubhe" (2019).
Lama Jabb (མདའ་ཚན་བླ་མ་སྐྱབས༏)
Birgit Kellner
Birgit Kellner studied Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, Japanology, Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Vienna (1987–1994) and completed her PhD in Indian Philosophy at the University of Hiroshima in 1999.
She conducted several post-doctoral research projects funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF at the University of Vienna from 1999 to 2009, received a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to conduct research at the University of Hamburg from 2002 to 2003, and was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008. She was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna in 2009.
Soon thereafter, she was appointed Professor for Buddhist Studies and Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in the Global Context" of the University of Heidelberg (W-3) (2010–15). Since 2015 she has served as Director of the IKGA at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She also has served as Principal Investigator in the FWF special research area "Visions of Community – Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400–1600 CE)" from 2016 to 2019, and is currently directing the FWF project "Rationality, Meditation and Liberation in Indian Buddhism" (2019–23).
Birgit Kellner is Full Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (since 2021), Adjunct Professor at the University of Heidelberg, Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Vice President of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, and Member of the Board of Directors, Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC).
Birgit Kellner
D. Christian Lammerts
D. Christian Lammerts is Professor of Buddhist and Southeast Asian Studies at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in Asian Religions from Cornell University in 2010. His research interests include the History of Buddhism in pre- and early modern Burma and Southeast Asia; Buddhist law and legal culture; Pali and Burmese literature; manuscripts and epigraphy; dhammasattha; and nissaya. He acted as a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Southeast Asian Literature at the National University of Singapore from 2011-2012. His book Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, c. 1250–1850 C.E, was published by University of Hawai'i Press in 2018. Lammerts joined the BDRC Board of Directors in February of 2017, bringing his expertise in Southeast Asian Studies to our growing Board.
D. Christian Lammerts
Clerk
Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (PhD, University of Virginia) is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author, editor, or translator of a number of works, including Prisoners of Shangri-La, The Madman's Middle Way, Buddhist Scriptures, and The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (with Robert Buswell). In 2000 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
Ted Lipman
Ted Lipman's career has spanned over 40 years as an Asianist: in diplomacy, philanthropy, academia and culture.
One of a handful of Canadian students in China during the Cultural Revolution, after completing studies at Peking University in 1976, Ted embarked on a 35 year diplomatic career.
Highlights include appointments as Canadian Consul General in Shanghai, Minister/DCM in Beijing, Director/HOM of Canada's trade office in Taipei, Director General for North Asia at Global Affairs HQ and Ted's last diplomatic assignment, Canadian ambassador to both North and South Korea. Ted was also a visiting diplomatic fellow at the UBC Institute of Asian Research (Korean Studies).
Subsequent to his diplomatic career, for almost a decade, Ted served as CEO of the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation, a leading HK based philanthropy supporting culture, academia and Buddhism. He currently is the Director of a consultancy and design firm based in Hong Kong.
Ted Lipman
Michele Martin
In 1966 Michele received a Masters degree in Russian Area Studies and in 1970, an MPhil in Comparative Literature, both from Yale University. After founding and practicing at Jemez Bodhi Mandala Zen Center in New Mexico from 1974 to 1977, she moved to Kyoto, Japan where she studied at Otani University with Nagao Gadjin and Nishitani Keiji in the years from 1977 to 1979.
After working as an editor for many years, which included developing the Buddhist series at SUNY Press, she moved to Nepal in 1987 to study Buddhist philosophy and the Tibetan language. Over the years, she has edited many volumes on Buddhism and translated texts from Tibetan while teaching and acting as an oral translator. She is the author of Music in the Sky: The Life, Art, and Teaching of the Seventeenth Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje and translator of the root text and general editor of A Song for the King: Saraha's Mahamudra Meditation.
Michele's interest in TBRC is multiple. Not connected with a university and often living in places where access to texts is difficult, she has turned to TBRC for copies of texts not available otherwise. She would like to see the number of texts within reach on the internet expanded and also especially values the database developed by Gene Smith.
As a translator, she wants to see a database of translations, both finished and in progress, as a key tool for those inside and outside academia. With TBRC's texts and database, access to the field of Tibetan studies is opened out to meet the needs of lamas from all traditions, scholar practitioners, new students, and researchers from all over the world.
Michele Martin
Andrew Quintman
Andrew Quintman is a scholar of Buddhist traditions in Tibet and the Himalaya, and Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Wesleyan University. He writes, teaches, and lectures about Buddhist literature and history, sacred geography and pilgrimage, and visual cultures of the wider Himalaya. His work addresses the intersections of Buddhist literary production, circulation, and reception; the reciprocal influences of textual and visual narratives; and the formation of religious subjectivities and institutional identities. His book, The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet's Great Saint Milarepa (Columbia University Press 2014), won the American Academy of Religion's 2014 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, the 2015 Heyman Prize for outstanding scholarship from Yale University, and received honorable mention for the 2016 E. Gene Smith Book Prize from the Association of Asian Studies. In 2010, his new English translation of The Life of Milarepa was published by Penguin Classics. He is currently writing a history of Drakar Taso Monastery that explores Buddhist religious and literary culture in the borderlands of Tibet and Nepal. He also co-directs a project on the Life of the Buddha through visual and literary materials associated with Tāranātha's seventeenth-century Jonang Phuntsokling Monastery in western Tibet.
Andrew Quintman
President
James Robson
James Robson is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Robson received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Stanford University in 2002, after spending many years doing research in China, Taiwan, and Japan. He specializes in the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism and Daoism and is particularly interested in issues of sacred geography, local religious history, talismans, and Chan/Zen Buddhism.
Robson is the author of Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak [Nanyue 南嶽] in Medieval China (Harvard, 2009), which was awarded the Stanislas Julien Prize for 2010 by the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres and the 2010 Toshihide Numata Book Prize in Buddhism. His publications also include "Signs of Power: Talismanic Writings in Chinese Buddhism" (History of Religions 48:2), "Faith in Museums: On the Confluence of Museums and Religious Sites in Asia" (PMLA, 2010), and "A Tang Dynasty Chan Mummy [roushen] and a Modern Case of Furta Sacra? Investigating the Contested Bones of Shitou Xiqian."
Robson joined the BDRC Board of Directors in February of 2017; prior to joining the BDRC Board Directors, Robson served as a member of the BDRC Board of Advisors, providing guidance on the preservation of East Asian materials.
James Robson
Kurtis Schaeffer
Kurtis R. Schaeffer is the Frances Myers Ball Professor of Religion and the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is a student of Buddhist history and culture, with a special interest in the spiritual literature of Tibet and the Himalayas. He is the author or editor of nine books, including the largest anthology of Tibetan literature in English and, most recently, a translation of the life of the Buddha. Schaeffer co-directs the half-century old Tibetan Buddhist studies graduate program at the University of Virginia and, with Martien Halvorson-Taylor, directs the Global Religion Lab at UVA.
Kurtis Schaeffer
Treasurer
Lisa Schubert
Lisa Schubert has spent most of her career either directing, developing, or coordinating projects. She recently stepped down as VP, Cathedral Programming & External Relations at the Cathedral of St John the Divine (2008 – 2023) in New York, where she was charged with creating an institutional framework for funding, staffing, and implementing a multi-disciplinary arts program and an ongoing menu of events and projects of civic engagement in the humanities. Prior to joining the Cathedral, Lisa worked for the Rubin Museum of Art, which she joined as the first staff member at the inception in 1998. She worked closely with the founders to refine and develop the original concept and put together the "start-up" team. Her career has involved most aspects of cultural administration including policy, strategic planning, public education, programming, operations, administration, communications, and development. Lisa also serves on the boards of Food & Water Watch, a national organization, with international chapters, founded to protect our food, water and climate; and the Early Music Foundation, which fosters public understanding and appreciation of western culture through historically-informed performances of music from the 11th through the 18th centuries.