Professor Emerita of Religion and East Asian Studies at Boston University, she is widely recognized for her scholarship on Daoism and Chinese longevity practices. Over the course of her career, she has authored and edited numerous books and articles, and she brings the depth of a long-term practitioner to her teaching through taiji quan, meditation, yoga, qigong, and Core Health facilitation.
Her work is distinguished by the ability to place each practice within its historical and cultural setting while also showing how it can be meaningfully applied in modern Western life. She earned her Ph.D. in 1980 and spent six years at Kyoto University in Japan before joining Boston University in 1988. She later returned to Kyoto for two additional two-year periods.
She has also taught in a range of academic settings, including Eötvös Lorand University in Budapest, the Stanford Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Union Institute in Cincinnati, San Francisco State University, and the Taoist College Singapore. After retiring from active teaching in 2006, she continued her work as a freelance researcher and lecturer.
Having lived in Kyoto for nearly ten years, she is also an expert in Japanese religions. Her publications include thirty-four sole-authored books, more than one hundred articles, eleven edited volumes, and five translations from German, French, Chinese, and Japanese. Since 2008, she has served as executive editor of the Journal of Daoist Studies, producing a 250-page volume each year.
In addition, she manages Three Pines Press, known as the Western voice of Daoism, serves on numerous committees and editorial boards, and leads Daoist qigong and Core Health workshops around the world. She is also the lead organizer of a major international conference series on Daoism, with the next event scheduled at Belmont University in Nashville in June 2023. She further guides study and hiking tours to Japan, with the next tour planned for October 2022.