Don Noble is an Instructor in the Department of Cell Biology at Emory University. He received his BS in Neuroscience from the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2008, and his PhD in Neuroscience from Emory in 2016. Dr. Noble’s academic interests include understanding fundamental sensory processes that contribute to the benefits of meditation, with an emphasis on slow, deep breathing. For his PhD, he developed an animal model of the relaxation response by using operant conditioning to train rodents to slow their breathing, and pursued the idea that patterned activation of mechanically sensitive lung afferents can shift autonomic balance, decrease stress and pain, and improve performance. As a Postdoc, he pioneered remote respiratory recordings to investigate breathing deficits in the context of chronic pain after traumatic injury. Dr. Noble is passionate about integrating these ideas across fields, and adapting them to educational curricula that explore alternative and sometimes unconventional approaches to enhance well-being. His research publications to date have focused on the functions and mechanisms of slow, deep breathing as a voluntary portal to autonomic nervous system control, while ongoing physio-behavioral studies in his lab use chemogenetic techniques to elucidate how the simple, repetitive act of breathing can powerfully modulate mental states.

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