J. Greg Serpa

J. Greg Serpa, PhD, is a clinical psychologist for the US Department of Veterans Affairs at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System. He is honored to teach mindfulness to America’s veterans and is the first full-time mindfulness teacher and trainer in the federal system. Serpa is an associate clinical professor in the psychology department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an associate visiting clinical scientist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He teaches intensive mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), mindful self-compassion (MSC), and introductory level mindfulness classes at four area hospitals, and serves as a trainer, supervisor, and consultant to clinicians at the VA and UCLA. He is currently the director of interprofessional mental health education at the West Los Angeles VA, where he trains psychology postdoctoral fellows, psychiatry residents, social work interns, and nurses in mindfulness and integrative modalities of health and well-being. Serpa is a national mindfulness content expert for the VA’s Office of Patient Centered Care and Cultural Transformation, where he and Christiane Wolf are preparing mindfulness toolkits for national dissemination. He is also an active researcher with a number of projects expanding on the evidence basis of mindfulness interventions. This includes a National Institutes of Health–funded biomarker study examining the impact of meditation on brain structure in combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who have traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic headache.