Mill Valley, California
A Living Laboratory for Resilience and Flourishing
An intergenerational live/work/learn community on 130 acres in Marin County — where seniors, students, researchers, and families share daily life, and where the science of resilience meets the practice of it.
Vision
A world where resilience and flourishing are the ordinary condition of being human
If we succeed, individuals will move through their lives with a felt sense of safety, health, and belonging — not as private achievements, but as the expected texture of daily life.
Communities of care will be the basic unit of daily life, with kinship, ritual, and intergenerational caregiving woven into where people live, work, and grow old. Our clinics, food systems, schools, and training programs will treat resilience as core to their mission. People will have the knowledge, technologies, and skills to contribute to ecosystem resilience: preventing ecological harm where possible, adapting where necessary.
Our labor and economic systems, and the software and AI technologies that increasingly mediate our lives, will be designed to support the conditions under which people and ecosystems can flourish.
Mission
Closing the gap between knowing and doing
Fern Commons exists to close the gap between knowing what builds resilience and actually making it a core premise of our world. We do this by turning resilience and flourishing into something people can measure, test, trust, and adopt — and by demonstrating these practices on our 130-acre intergenerational campus, across housing, senior care, childcare, research, laboratories, arts, and dining.
The Living Laboratory
The campus earns the right to talk about resilience by practicing it
Fern Commons translates evidence-based research into action through education, design, and arts-based cultural transformation. We focus on the second half of the translational pipeline — not just producing good science, but ensuring it actually gets adopted by the clinicians, policymakers, and communities who need it most.
When we convene, we measure success by what happens after — not by attendance. Every convening includes a defined follow-up process: who continues the work, on what timeline, with what resources, and against what outcomes. The question we ask is always: did it get implemented, and did it help?
Fern Commons works from the inside out — starting with what it can credibly model on its own grounds, then radiating outward into systems-level change.
Most health and social innovations fail not because the intervention doesn't work, but because adoption is unsolved — payers, providers, policymakers, and communities aren't at the table when interventions are designed. Fern Commons' distinctive value is treating adoption as equally important as science, and bringing adoption stakeholders in from day one.
We define, test, and propagate metrics for evaluating resilience at the individual, relational, community, and ecosystem levels — integrating biomarkers and behavioral signals alongside community-informed qualitative measures. This ensures the science and practice of resilience gets taken seriously by stakeholders who currently don't prioritize it.
Framework
A Nested Approach to Resilience
Each level of our work is nested within the next — moving from micro to macro, from what we can touch and measure on campus today to the civilizational conditions we're working toward.
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The Individual
Physical and mental health, safety, meaning, and belonging
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The Community of Care
Relationships, ritual, intergenerational caregiving, and the everyday texture of campus life
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Institutions
Clinics, food systems, schools, training programs, healthcare and insurance
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Society
Policy, labor and economy, technology and AI, regional infrastructure
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The Biosphere and Noosphere
Climate, the social contract, global governance — the shared ideas and conditions that make collective resilience possible
The Campus
A philanthropic higher education and research organization
Fern Commons operates as a higher education and research institution with a maximum enrollment of 500 students alongside continuing education and public workshops. On-campus housing for students, faculty, and staff supports the close-knit residential community that makes resilience practicable rather than theoretical.
A campus food center — encompassing a dining hall, café, nutrition center, and culinary education programs — anchors daily community life. The Arts Center supports art therapy training, studio practice, and a public auditorium, alongside a shared collection featuring work by individuals and communities that embody our mission.
201 Seminary Drive · Mill Valley, California · Marin County
A place where the ideas we work on are also the conditions we live in.
A Place With History, Reimagined
Fern Commons sits on 130 acres in the Strawberry neighborhood of Mill Valley, on land that has long held educational and community purpose. Originally developed in 1953 as the Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary — and once considered as a candidate site for the headquarters of the United Nations — the campus has been a place of gathering, learning, and inquiry for over seven decades.
Its buildings perch on the upper hillside with sweeping views of Richardson Bay and San Francisco. Its fields anchor the lower grounds, used for decades by community youth leagues and neighborhood residents. Its roads wind through a landscape that has always felt more like a village than an institution.
Fern Commons came to this place with a specific question: what would it look like to take a campus that already belonged to the community and build something genuinely new on top of that history? Not a retreat center. Not a conference campus. A living laboratory — a place where the ideas we work on are also the conditions we live in.
An Intergenerational Community
Fern Commons is designed around the belief that flourishing doesn't happen in isolation — it happens across generations, in the ordinary friction and nourishment of lives lived in proximity to one another. Our campus brings together graduate students and researchers, older adults, families, and the broader Marin community in a low-density, walkable environment that emphasizes connection over convenience.
Research consistently shows that intergenerational contact reduces loneliness, improves cognitive health in older adults, and accelerates development in young people. At Fern Commons, that's not a program — it's just Tuesday. Mentorship happens in the lunch line. Ideas cross-pollinate at the playing field. Elders and students share the same paths through the same hills.
The Land
The land itself is part of the curriculum
The campus spans 130 acres of hillside terrain in southern Marin, bordered by open space and connected to the natural ecosystems of the Bay. Academic and research facilities occupy the upper campus, where light and views make for productive thinking. Residential spaces are nestled into the northerly hillsides. The central playing fields are shared freely with the surrounding neighborhood, as they have been for decades.
Its patterns — seasonal, ecological, generational — are a constant teacher. The name Fern Commons is not decorative: it points to something we take seriously, that what we build here belongs, in a meaningful sense, to everyone who inhabits and cares for it.
These aren't aspirations. They are commitments — tested daily against what we actually do.
Show, don't tell
Fern Commons demonstrates rather than explains, and creates rather than publishes white papers. Success is measured by our ability to test, disseminate, and actually get new approaches to resilience adopted and showing impact in the world.
Ensure meaningful access
Who gets to be a student, a faculty member, a participant? We treat this as a first-order design question, not a downstream add-on. Accreditation pathways, training programs, and learning models are deliberately more porous than traditional academia — including for adults without bachelor's degrees, for practitioners, and for community members.
Art, culture, and storytelling are core infrastructure
Joy, comedy, stories, celebration, art, food, and ritual are not nice-to-haves. They are critical infrastructure for learning about, building, and spreading a culture of resilience.
Don't scale before we know something works
We closely maintain the infrastructure that protects our work: financial sustainability without donor capture, physical and emotional safety, clear policies on platforming and partnerships, self-determined governance, and the trust-building practices that make hard conversations possible. We test before we amplify.
Working at the intersection of stress science, precision medicine, and public health — asking how adversity gets under the skin, and what it actually takes to build resilience across the human lifespan.
Founded and directed by George Slavich, PhD, one of the world's leading researchers on stress and health, the laboratory is home to a team of postdoctoral researchers, trainees, and collaborators working across three major areas of funded inquiry. Across all three, the laboratory integrates biomarkers and behavioral signals with community-informed qualitative measures — and treats equity not as an add-on but as a design principle.
Grant 1 · ARPA-H / Buck Institute
Stress, Resilience, and Healthy Aging: The THRIVE Initiative
In partnership with the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and the YMCA, and funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), the laboratory is a core partner in THRIVE: Transforming Health — Reclaiming Intrinsic Vitality for Everyone. THRIVE is developing the first FDA-grade Intrinsic Capacity Score — a validated, scalable measure to predict healthy aging and resilience at the population level.
The initiative aims to transform how clinicians, researchers, and communities understand what it means to age well, moving beyond the absence of disease toward a positive science of vitality and healthspan.
Grant 2 · California Governor's Office / NASEM
Women's Mental Health
Funded by the California Governor's Office of Planning and Research and the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine, the laboratory conducts research to advance the science and practice of women's mental health. Women are twice as likely as men to experience depression and anxiety across the lifespan — a disparity shaped by hormonal transitions, social determinants of health, and a long history of underinvestment in women's health research.
The laboratory contributes to a national effort to change this, including through published policy recommendations arising from a workshop convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which brought together researchers, clinicians, policymakers, payors, and community members to develop concrete, evidence-based strategies for improving prevention, treatment, and care across the arc of women's lives.
Grant 3 · NIH SBIR
Alzheimer's Prevention in Women: The Flourish All Initiative
In partnership with the digital health platform Flourish All and funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the laboratory is investigating stress reduction as a pathway to Alzheimer's disease prevention in midlife women. Women account for two-thirds of all Alzheimer's patients — a disparity driven in part by the neuroinflammatory effects of menopause and the disproportionate stress burden women carry across their lives.
Through an NIH-funded clinical trial, the laboratory is testing an AI-powered precision intervention — personalized to each participant's stress levels, sleep, and physical activity — and tracking its effects on inflammation, cognitive performance, and Alzheimer's risk biomarkers. The study integrates wearables, at-home blood collection, and speech analysis to measure biological and behavioral change at scale, with the goal of producing a replicable, accessible model for protecting cognitive health in the populations most at risk.
Research Team
The People Behind the Science
George Slavich, PhD
Chief Science Officer, Co-Founder & Laboratory Director
George Slavich is one of the world's leading researchers on stress, resilience, and human health. He is a Professor at UC Irvine Medical School and the originator of Social Safety Theory — a landmark framework describing how experiences of social safety and threat shape the brain, immune system, and behavior across the lifespan. His work sits at the intersection of clinical psychology, neuroscience, and immunology, asking a deceptively simple question: why does social experience get under the skin, and what can we do about it?
Slavich directs the California Stress, Trauma, and Resilience (CAL STAR) Network and previously founded and directed the UCLA Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research. His research has produced hundreds of peer-reviewed papers in journals including JAMA Psychiatry and Nature Medicine, and has earned him recognition as a Beck Institute Scholar and Branco Weiss Fellow. He trained at Stanford University, completed his PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Oregon, and conducted his clinical internship at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School.
Summer Mengelkoch, MS, PhD
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (she/her)
Summer Mengelkoch is an experimental social psychologist who uses evolutionary theory to study the relationships between biology and behavior — including how inflammation shapes decision-making, how hormonal contraceptives affect women's stress responses, and how early-life stress echoes into adult health. She completed her BA at the University of Minnesota, her MS at Texas Christian University under Dr. Sarah E. Hill, and her PhD at TCU in 2022. She is also a co-founder and operations director of EOS BioAnalytics, a nonprofit working to make bioanalytic methods more accessible across scientific disciplines.
Jeff Gassen, PhD
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (he/him)
Jeff Gassen is a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and Senior Statistician for the UCLA-UCSF ACEs Aware Family Resilience Network. His research uses multivariate and multilevel statistical methods to study how environments, biology, and health interact — with particular attention to the long reach of early-life stress. He received his PhD in Experimental Psychology from Texas Christian University in 2020 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Biological Anthropology at Baylor University before joining UCLA.
Jenna Alley, PhD
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (she/her)
Jenna Alley leads the CAL STAR Network's Social Justice, Equity & Inclusion workgroup. Her research examines the psychobiological pathways through which stress, adversity, and abuse affect the mental, physical, and sexual health of sexually and gender diverse populations. She holds a PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Utah. Throughout her work, Jenna attends closely to how race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and other intersecting factors shape human experience — and actively works to change the structural conditions that marginalize those perspectives in research and academic life.
Kimya Afshar
Laboratory Manager
Kimya Afshar manages day-to-day operations of the Fern Commons research laboratory, bringing experience across neuroscience, clinical research, and cognitive science. She spent nearly three years as a research assistant and then laboratory manager at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and has contributed to research in transcranial functional ultrasound stimulation and clinical settings at iSono Health. She holds a BA in Cognitive Science with a computing specialization from UCLA.
