Biography

Sue Smalley, PhD was born in Minneapolis and raised in Indiana. She moved to Los Angeles in 1976. UCLA was her home through graduate school, a post-doc fellowship, and then as a professor in the Department of Psychiatry until she retired in 2012. She jumped into women’s rights work immediately upon retirement and helped grow an organization, Equality Now, that works to gain equal rights under the law for women and girls around the world. At the same time, she began working in business, investing in start-up companies that work to enhance the human condition, with a particular focus on health and wellbeing. It’s been a rewarding phase of life to bring my scientific background and love of mindfulness into different sectors of work beyond academia. Outside of work, she loves meditation, painting and writing. Most of all she enjoys hanging with my husband whom I’ve known for 50 years and our extended family – traveling, playing games, swimming, and just having fun.

As a behavioral geneticist, she was active in bringing genetic research on autism and ADHD into our child psychiatry division and helped write the ‘white paper’ for the Neurobehavioral Genetics Center, now a world-renowned institute for research on genetic underpinnings of human behavior. Following a personal brush with death, she discovered mindfulness and other forms of meditation that led me down a rigorous study of the mind, starting with her own. Coupled with the science of mindfulness, we launched theUCLA mindful awareness research center (MARC) in 2004 and have grown that into a leading center of the practice and science of mindfulness. Just before covid began, she helped co-create the new Bedari Kindness Institute on campus, thanks to a generous gift by Matt and Jennifer Harris, dedicated to the science of kindness and bringing it out into the world through education and impact in social programs. Through all of this work, she finds the greatest gift to herself and others is just sharing what matters most with one another: it’s rare to hear anything other than kindness, compassion, and care for each other and the world.

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. A good artist lets her intuition take her where it may.” – Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“A good scientist lets her opinions go to see what is.” – Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching