Tawni Tidwell, TMD, Ph.D. is a Tibetan medical physician (also known as “menpa” or “amchi”), who studied Tibetan medicine at Men-Tsee-Khang in north India and Sorig Loling Tibetan Medical College of Tso-Ngon (Qinghai) University in eastern Tibet with a year internship in gastroenterology at the Tso-Ngon (Qinghai) Provincial Tibetan Medical Hospital, graduating with a Kachupa-level degree in Tibetan medicine in July 2015. Tawni did her Ph.D. in biocultural anthropology at Emory University, where she looked at the sensory entrainment processes for diagnostics in Tibetan medical education, graduating in 2017. In 2018-2019 she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, tracking pharmacology lineages across eastern Tibet, primarily in Amdo and Kham; and at the University of Vienna on a project researching concepts of “potency” in Tibetan medicine and Buddhist ritual literature. 

Starting in August 2019, she will join the Center for Healthy Minds at UW-Madison as a postdoctoral researcher bringing a Tibetan medical and biocultural perspective to their research on wellbeing and healthy minds. She has maintained private clinical practices in Atlanta and Vienna, and will be shifting clinical work to Madison this summer. She sees a wide spectrum of conditions including cancer, metabolic, and neurologic disorders with particular attention to subtle mental and physical patterns that lead to chronic and persistent conditions. She works closely with patients on health practices that support their spiritual practice, and vice versa. Her approach looks at the natural cycles, internal and external, that support our body-mind’s compassion and wisdom, and treating through nutritional, lifestyle, medicinal, and external therapeutic approaches that support an individual’s healing and flourishing. She is deeply indebted to the great kindness of her root teacher in dharma, Phakchok Rinpoche, and that of her Tibetan medical teachers throughout her education.