Marilyn Cornelius

Marilyn Cornelius, PhD. Photo credit: Sidhant Bali Maharaj, the Label

marilyn cornelius
(r)evolutionary


Marilyn specializes in how to improve wellness and leadership while reducing climate change with the same behaviors at the same time. She does this with individuals such as CEOs, executive teams, and entire organizations through coaching, workshops, retreats, and the design, implementation and evaluation of wellness and leadership programs. Creativity, love of nature, fascination with human behavior, and passion for working with people characterize Marilyn’s professional life. Marilyn is an integrator who coaches, facilitates, writes, teaches, speaks, guides meditation and creates art. 

Career

She began her career as Fiji’s Assistant National Director of the International Waters Program, a project focused on coastal fisheries, freshwater, and waste management in the South Pacific region. She went on to work with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) managing projects relating to climate change, land degradation, biodiversity, and capacity building in ten South Pacific Island nations; in this capacity she worked with country managers, governments, the UNDP team, and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). These experiences sensitized her to the different values and goals of developing nations, the United Nations, and funding agencies. 

While applying to graduate school, Marilyn assisted the late climatologist Steve Schneider with multiple projects at Stanford University. Steve’s unparalleled brilliance, leadership, and integrity in his quest to communicate and address climate change challenges inspired her to change her initial focus on climate justice to how people could reduce and adapt to climate change by modifying their daily actions. Her dissertation focused on designing behavioral solutions to reduce residential energy use, (see PhD Defense).  She was inspired by the connections between climate change and health through her formative research on promising options for deep energy savings

Marilyn was introduced to design thinking at the Stanford d.school, and she immediately began applying the process to her research design. Consequently, with a team of like-minded students and researchers, she co-founded a program called Research as Design, teaching design thinking adapted for the needs of graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and professors, and conducting research on how design thinking impacts research design in higher education.

Reiki, a chi-based stress reduction and healing technique, was one of Marilyn’s pursuits while at Stanford. After three years of study and practice, she became a Reiki Master and co-founded a company called All About Reiki, which served clients in the San Francisco Bay Area through Reiki sessions, practices, classes, and meditation circles.

Marilyn’s research, professional, and personal experiences inspired her to co-found d.cipher, a change management company focused on supporting communities and organizations at the nexus of climate change, wellness, and education to build resilience and leadership through workshops and advisory services. Through d.cipher, Marilyn consulted with diverse organizations in the U.S. and internationally, such as the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, the East-West Center, the European Union’s Global Climate Change Alliance, and WestEd, working on projects related to environmental leadership, climate adaptation planning, indigenous education research, and wellness. 

Discerning a need to create a more complete model with which to support her clients, Marilyn began to formulate a new framework for leadership. Integrating across behavioral science, design thinking, biomimicry, and meditation, she created a new model intended to enhance integrity, enable win-win solutions, and mainstream innovation for leaders and organizations working to create better teams and a better world.

Over the months that Marilyn was developing what would come to be known as the Alchemus Prime Diamond Model, she noticed that the company name, vision, and mission evolved seamlessly out of the inspirations she was receiving from nature, Native American traditions, her intuition, and the integration of her training. Alchemus Prime is a manifestation of Marilyn’s identity as a change agent in harmony with nature. Now, clients hail from all over the world, including France, India, Australia, Fiji, and of course the United States. Alchemus Prime is now registered in two countries – the United States and Fiji. 

Through Alchemus Prime, Marilyn provides an array of services, including Lasting Transformation – her life coaching methodology, and a set of wellness programs for corporations and communities – L.I.V.E. Well and Conscious Wellness. She consults on a variety of climate change projects, and supports diverse leaders as a facilitator and change management consultant. Her facilitation approach focuses on creating safe spaces for inspiring change in habits around empowerment through self-love, trauma release, leadership, empowered communication,  wellness, and creativity. Integrating tools from behavioral sciences, design thinking, biomimicry, and meditation, she tailors and adapts workshops for every audience, paying special attention to participants’ contexts, cultures, and perspectives. Marilyn has facilitated workshops in many realms, for example behavioral approaches to diabetes management and stress reduction, personal and professional development for women, climate change adaptation for cities and countries, vision, mission and values development for non-profits, behavioral wellness for a national ministry of health, team dynamics for a national women’s fund, and design thinking for teachers and youth. 

Education

Marilyn obtained her doctorate from Stanford University, specializing in behavioral sciences and climate change. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in business management with an emphasis in environmental resource management, and an Associate of Arts in graphic design. In addition to pursuing biomimicry training through workshops with Toby Herzlich and later Dayna Baumeister with the intention to transform business with biomimicry, Marilyn continued to study meditation techniques. She learned mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and transcendental meditation (TM) and applied them in her own life and work. Marilyn has also received Vipassana Meditation training as well as Heartfulness Meditation training. 

Service

Currently, Marilyn offers three ongoing forms of service through Alchemus Prime. The first is Mornings with Marilyn, a video show on Facebook serving a private community of over 700 people. She provides guidance on positivity, mindfulness, reflection, and trauma. Her second free service is Dr. An, a comedic character who appears in live videos on Facebook, an-swering questions about trauma. Beyond Medicine is a third show Marilyn hosts, along with her mother, Dr. Margaret Cornelius, and together they discuss topics related to wellness via weekly Facebook videos. 

Marilyn has assisted two talented incarcerated people with compiling, designing, editing, and publishing their first illustrated volume of poetry through Alchemus Prime. The book, released in January 2021, is called Awakening the Sacred Order of Divine Poets, and includes poems and illustrations about how to awaken humanity from trauma and illusion. The book is intended to spark more projects that use writing and art to help inmates heal and reform themselves. Marilyn has also published their second book, Eternity Risen, in August 2021. Marilyn’s interest in prison reform began in 2015 when she attended a non-violent communication workshop in San Francisco County Jail. 

Marilyn has served as Chief of Staff and Coach for UN Women USA – San Francisco Bay Area Chapter. Using her own past trauma and coaching work to nurture UN Women’s mission to empower women and girls globally has been a wonderful way for Marilyn to give back. She has also served as a Heartfulness Trainer, conducting individual and group meditations.

Marilyn is a passionate climate change and social justice activist who has co-founded social movements such as Operation Missing Link and 51@EarthHour, as well as the e-zine Life, Love, V. She has co-founded and run formal and informal service-learning, mentoring, and tutoring initiatives for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, including SERV at Menlo College, and tutored orphans and other disadvantaged youth for over 21 years. She has served as a Reiki Volunteer in Kaiser Permanente’s Hospice Department, helping bring stress relief to those who are dying as well as their families. 

When taking breaks from coaching, facilitation, consulting, retreats, and book tours, Marilyn enjoys the creative arts, including dancing, writing poetry, making art, and creating vegan and gluten-free recipes, with four recipe books published to date that also form part of her work on wellness.