Tenzin Namdul, PhD 

CHAI recognizes and celebrates its Members, Community Partners, and Ambassadors monthly. This month, we feature Tenzin Namdul, TMD, PhD.

Dr. Tenzin Namdul is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Tibetan Healing Initiative at the University of Minnesota’s Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing. His research focuses on cognitive resilience, cross-cultural medicine, death and dying, aging, and end-of-life care. He received his PhD in Medical Anthropology from Emory University and Tibetan medicine degree from the Men-Tsee-Khang Tibetan Medical College in India. He incorporates his diverse training to examine how the intersection of bio-sociocultural factors shapes the ways individuals age and die, and care for the dying. For his doctoral research, Dr. Namdul examined how people’s perspectives about death and dying translate into their care for dying individuals and their own dying process. Specifically, he studied the Tibetan Buddhist contemplative practice of tukdam—a meditation an adept practitioner indulges in after clinical death—through ethnographic study and shows how it informs and shapes both the sociomoral fabric of life and the sense of wellbeing at the time of dying among Tibetans in southern India. Dr. Namdul’s current research is an interdisciplinary study of healthy aging among Tibetan Buddhist monks in India.