Michael Brown
Senior Instructor
Michael Brown is a scholar-practitioner currently residing in Brisbane, Australia. He has been practicing since 2009, except for a year when he was living in China. He completed an Honours of Classical Chinese in 2015 at UQ. In 2019 he and Allen Tsaur released their first translation, Explanations of Channels and Points Vol 1. In 2020, he edited the Complete Compendium of Zhang Jingyue Vol 1-3: Eight Principles, Ten Questions, and Mingmen Theory. In 2021 he released the second volume of Explanations of Channels and Points, which concluded the translation of this text. His main areas of research are on the classics of Chinese medicine as well as understanding literary trends within medical texts. In 2022, Michael edited Complete Compendium of Zhang Jingyue Vol. 50-51 Part 1: The Eight Battle Arrays of New Formulae with Commentaries and Supplementary Cases Studies. Currently, he is editing Part 2 of Jingyue’s formulae, as well as working on translating a pulse text from the Qing dynasty.
Ivan Zavala
Senior Instructor
Ivan Zavala II is the founder of Cloudgate Acupuncture and specializes in oncology, autoimmune, and complex disease. He has been the Department Head of Foundational Theory and Advanced Diagnostics at Chicago College of Oriental Medicine, where he developed and taught several foundational classes, advanced herbalism topics, acupuncture methodologies and diagnostics. Ivan is also an international lecturer in Latin America and Europe, where he has taught Shang Han Lun, Jin Gui Yao Lue and classical acupuncture principles to many. As a practitioner and professor of Chinese medicine, his interests lie in treating severe and complex disease with direct insight and guidance from the Chinese medical classics. Over the years, he has answered thousands of clinical and medical literature questions of practitioners from around the world, becoming a specialist in the illumination of the canonical corpus into practical application.
Practitioner, translator, scholar and teacher of Chinese medicine. Will completed his rigorous 5-year Chinese medical training in Taiwan's China Medical University Post-Baccalaureate program and became one of only a handful of foreign practitioners to pass the Taiwanese medical boards and go into clinical practice on the island. While in practice, he also completed a masters in China Medical University's Chinese Medical Classics and History department, penning a Chinese-language master's thesis on 19th century materia medica master Zou Run-an's singular analysis of the pathomechanisms of formulas in Zhang Zhongjing's seminal Han dynasty classic The Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Diseases. This research helped him to develop deeper insights into the mechanisms of actions of herbs in jingfang (經方) formulas and informs his own practice and teaching. Since then, he has continued to train in jingfang under the Director of the Hu Xishu Master Physician Research Institute and jingfang pulse practitioner Chen Jianguo. (陈建国)