Turiel. Her current position at the University of Texas at Austin started in 1999, and she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006.
During Kristin’s last year of graduate school in 1997 she became interested in Buddhism, and has been practicing meditation in the Insight Meditation tradition ever since. While doing her post-doctoral work she decided to conduct research on self-compassion – a central construct in Buddhist psychology and one that had not yet been examined empirically.
She has developed an 8-week program to teach self-compassion skills. The program, co-created with her colleague Chris Germer at Harvard University, is called Mindful Self-Compassion. Her book titled "Self-Compassion" was published by William Morrow in April, 2011. Kristin was recently featured in the best-selling book and award-winning documentary called The Horse Boy, which chronicles her family’s adventure with autism.
Darrin M. McMahon is a professor of history at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), which has been translated into twelve languages, and was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Library Journal, and Slate Magazine. McMahon has just completed a history of the idea of genius and the genius figure, Divine Fury: A History of Genius, published in late 2013 with Basic Books, and his writings have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Shani Robins, pioneered the field of Wisdom Therapy in 1998. He is a licensed Psychologist and the founder and director of the Wisdom Therapy Institute since 2000. He is an instructor at Stanford University Medical School’s Health Improvement Program, and an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Robins received his B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy from UCLA in 1989, his M.A. and Ph.D. in Cognitive Experimental Psychology from U.C. Santa Barbara in 1996, completed a 2-year National Institute of Mental Health Postdoc at U.C. Irvine in 1999 and a Ph.D. re-specialization in Clinical Psychology in 2002. He has published and has given numerous clinical workshops, invited talks, scientific conference presentations, and corporate consultations nationally and internationally on Wisdom Therapy and its relationships to cognitions, emotions, stress reduction, relationships, work place effectiveness, coping, emotional intelligence, performance, and organizational consulting.
He is a member of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and has won many honors including inclusion in Strathmore’s Who’s Who. In his spare time Shani plays racquetball, chess, and GO, rollerblades, salsa dances, runs marathons, and watches sun rises.
Barbara Fredrickson, earned her undergraduate degree from Carleton College and her doctorate from Stanford University. She is currently Kenan Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with appointments in Psychology and the Kenan-Flagler School of Business. She is also Director of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory. Fredrickson is a leading scholar within social psychology, affective science, and positive psychology, and has received more than 16 consecutive years of research funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Her research and teaching have been recognized with numerous honors, including, in 2000, the American Psychological Association's inaugural Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology, in 2008, the Society for Experimental Social Psychology's Career Trajectory Award, and in 2013, the inaugural Christopher Peterson Gold Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the International Positive Psychology Association. Her work is cited widely and she is regularly invited to give keynotes nationally and internationally. Fredrickson's 2009 book, Positivity, describes the relevance of her 20-year research program on positive emotions for a general readership. Her 2013 book, Love 2.0, offers a fresh and practical perspective on this most vital human emotion.
Senia Maymin, Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Stanford, is a consultant and executive coach whose clients include Google, Intel, and VMware. Maymin runs a coaching network that provides coaching for upwards of 30 managers at a time to large technology companies in the Bay area. When entrepreneurs and executives seek far-reaching productivity improvements, they call on Maymin as an executive coach and workshop leader.
Maymin is the coauthor of the business book Profit from the Positive (McGraw-Hill Professional, 2013), and the co-business columnist for Live Happy Magazine. Maymin has been featured in the media—including PBS’s This Emotional Life, Business Week, The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch, and USA Today—primarily for her work as a positive psychology executive coach. Maymin founded and is editor in chief of a research news website featuring more than 1,000 articles by over 100 authors. She has worked in finance on Wall Street and in technology as cofounder and president of two start-ups.
Maymin holds a BA in Math and Economics from Harvard, a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA and PhD in Organizational Behavior from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She speaks Russian, French, and Japanese. She lives with her family in California.
