Sasha Sommerfeldt
Sasha Sommerfeldt, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist
As a member of the Research and Measures team, Dr. Sasha Sommerfeldt supports the scientific backbone of HMI contributing expertise on the Science of Wellbeing. Working with clients seeking to implement new wellbeing initiatives or measure the impact of existing programs, she develops rigorous measures of human behavior, designs experiments, analyzes data using advanced statistics, translates all that for non-science nerds to understand, and uses her knack for technology to automate systems and processes. Before joining HMI, she worked as a Senior Data Scientist at Procter and Gamble. Embedded with Marketing, Consumer Research, and Sales teams, she applied her background in advanced statistics, code, and analyzing human behavior (in all its messy, real-world context) to evaluate the impacts of marketing activities.
Pre-marketing era, she completed her doctorate in Psychology with Dr. Richard J. Davidson and HMI’s associated academic research group, the Center for Healthy Minds. The last four years of her doctorate, she led a large Randomized Clinical Control Trial evaluating the impact of the Healthy Minds Program app on mind-body coherence, a measure of the correspondence between individuals’ perceived and physiological stress (Sommerfeldt, 2023). Having previously discovered that people with higher mind-body coherence (i.e., stronger associations between perceived and physiological stress) tended to have higher mental and physical wellbeing (Sommerfeldt et al., 2019), she designed the trial to test whether mind-body coherence could be increased through mindfulness training as a way to increase wellbeing. Supporting research projects at the University of Minnesota and University of Wisconsin before her PhD, she ran MRI scans to capture cool brain images and programmed processing streams to turn them into numbers, as well as conducted loads of rigorous neurocognitive tests to precisely quantify human behavior. She was awarded over $200,000 in competitive grants and fellowships across her academic research experiences.
Dr. Sommerfeldt currently based in a jungle of houseplants and rooftop garden of cutting flowers in Cincinnati, Ohio with her flame-point siamese and tiger-striped boxer rescues. Her go-to wellbeing practice is yoga, which she also teaches imbued with mindfulness and an aim towards taking the practice beyond the mat.
Education
- PhD, Psychology (Clinical Research-Specialization), University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Delta Certificate in Evidence-Based Teaching and Learning
- MS, Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- BS, Psychology and Philosophy, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities