Research Fellow

The mission of the Barun Maek Research Society is to realign and reassert the Chinese ancient science framework of Yin Yang Five Elements to modern society through education, counseling and research. One way we intend to accomplish this is through the introduction of the Yin Yang Five Elements into academic discourse. We are proud to be working with professors and academics from around the world who seek to integrate Yin Yang Five Elements into their research as well as preserve their culture for future generations. Barun Maek Research Society is proud to introduce our first research fellow Dr. Xiao an Associate Professor of planning with emphasis in disaster management and community resilience. The bulk of her research was carried out at Texas A&M School of Architecture in the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center.

Research Design

Researching Yin Yang Five Elements poses many challenges from a western academic perspective. The comprehensive nature of the framework does not easily mesh with the scientific frameworks which seek to isolate provable elements of the natural world. The Yin Yang Five Elements framework is a tool that focuses more on relationships between elements in the environment and such can encompass many western disciplines at one moment from biology, psychology, philosophy, economics, nutrition etc. To help us solve this problem we have been working closely with Dr. Xiao to help find adequate means of research design and data collection that can be applied in an academic setting.

How Can I Research About Yin/Yang Five Elements?

• Applications: Designing research around applications of yin-yang five elements in a contemporary context.
• Applying Yin/Yang Five Elements in Modeling:The application of the framework to predict future actions of the individual, family, community and larger society. This has many applications in health, sociological, psychological, planning and education.
• Implementing Data Collection:Data collection is a challenge in that often points of data are not static as in the west and are in constant flux depending on weather, season, year or a person's state. Drawing static conclusions becomes hard in that they are often quite subtle and open to interpretation. One thing that can be needed is to establish a benchmark to go off of. The benchmark often is one's mood or the feeling a place evokes. Which is not a data point that can be easily addressed outside surveys in studies. We are working with Dr. Xiao on establishing a benchmark that integrates our existing data collection methods with one that will be generally accepted in an academic setting.

Dr. Xiao’s Statement

I am a university professor and researcher trained in science and social science. In the past fifteen years, my teaching, research, and service centered around hazards and community resilience. As principal investigator or co-principal investigator, I have received quite a few multi-million dollar research grants from the top funding agencies in the United States, including the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology. I have taken the leadership roles on developing the most cutting-edge procedures for understanding community disaster impact and resilience at internationally esteemed top research institutes such as the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. I have worked with the most brilliant minds in science and social science, in the fields of engineering, computer science and supercomputing, geography, geology, business, sociology, etc. to understand how we can help communities prepare for disasters. I have been hopeful when working with the most brilliant minds in multiple disciplines but many times frustrated by the lack of effective integration of our disciplinary knowledge. The western science is disciplinary. When we tried very hard to integrate multiple disciplines, we soon found we don't even speak the same language. We don't have the same definition on some of the most basic key terms. After many years of painstaking efforts and tens of millions of dollars spent on research, we made some progress but always concluded that we need to collect more data and do more research to know things for sure.

Barun Maek is a game changer. The COVID-19 outbreak started in 2019 and derailed me from my usual research path. Social distancing, quarantines, and lockdowns made it extremely difficult to conduct surveys. No new data was collected and my research almost halted. In 2021, I met with Eunji and Dillon, who invited me to learn Barun Maek. Out of curiosity, I took the intermediate class and then the advanced class. Barun Maek brought new wisdom to my life. I suddenly realized, this understanding is what I need. It opened a door to a brand new world for me. Barun Maek is a Chinese ancient scientific understanding of mind, body, and the universe. To me, it solves the fundamental problem of integrating fragmented disciplinary knowledge in the western science. Barun Maek, as a Daoist approach, provides a framework for holistic understanding of the universe. The Daoist believes that the human body is a small universe. Starting from the study of the human body (our small universe), we can understand human relationships, society, environment, and the cosmos. Because it starts from a holistic framework, integrated application is natural. When Yin Yang Five Elements work in harmony, there is no need to argue about disciplinary definitions.

Barun Maek provides a new way to do science. In Barun Maek, everything can be logically explained. Data can be collected and analyzed to see the effects. As a Barun Maek research fellow, I have been using this understanding to improve my own health, health of my family members, and my family relationships. I also applied this understanding on self-reliance to promote community resilience, starting from learning about growing plants, making food, and raising and caring for animals. Much research in the western science is based on probability and statistics. All the statistical models have an error term, which makes it difficult to give an absolute answer to questions. With the accumulated experiential knowledge gained from the implementations of Barun Maek, now I can make recommendations on community resilience with much more confidence. I know by using the Barun Maek paradigm, I can discover more and more truth and enlighten myself to the Dao.

Dr. Xiao is currently Associate Professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University (PSU). Before joining PSU, she worked as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University. She was a faculty fellow at the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University for nine years.