Daniel Schacter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Dan received his B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He subsequently developed a keen interest in amnesic disorders associated with various kinds of brain damage. He continued his research and education at the University of Toronto, where he received his Ph.D. in 1981. He taught on the faculty at Toronto for the next six years before joining the psychology department at the University of Arizona in 1987. In 1991, he joined the faculty at Harvard University. His research explores the relation between conscious and unconscious forms of memory, the nature of distortions and errors in remembering, and how we use memory to imagine future events. Many of Schacters studies are summarized in his 1996 book, Searching for Memory: The Brain, The Mind, and The Past, and his 2001 book, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, both winners of the APAs William James Book Award. Schacter has also received a number of awards for teaching and research, including the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions from the American Psychological Association. In 2013, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.Daniel Gilbert is Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. After attending the Community College of Denver and completing his B.A. from the University of Colorado, Denver, he went on to earn his Ph.D. from Princeton University. From 1985 to 1996, he taught at the University of Texas, Austin, and in 1996, he joined the faculty of Harvard University. He has received the American Psychological Associations Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology, the Diener Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology, and has won teaching awards that include the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize and the Harvard College Professorship. His research focuses on how and how well people think about their emotional reactions to future events. He is the author of the international best seller Stumbling on Happiness, which won the Royal Society's General Prize for best popular science book of the year, and he is the co-writer and host of the PBS television series, This Emotional Life.Matthew Nock is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Matt received his BA from Boston University in 1995 and his PhD from Yale University in 2003. He completed his clinical internship at Bellevue Hospital and the New York University Child Study Center, and then joined the faculty of Harvard University in 2003. While an undergraduate, he became interested in understanding why people do things to intentionally harm themselves, and he has been conducting research to answer that question ever since. His research is multidisciplinary and uses a wide range of methodological approaches (e.g., epidemiologic surveys, laboratory-based experiments, clinic-based studies, and most recently studies using data from smartphones and wearable sensors) to understand how these behaviors develop, how to predict them, and how to prevent their occurrence. He has received many teaching awards at Harvard, as well as four Early Career awards recognizing his research. In 2011, he was named a MacArthur “Genius” Award winner.Laurie Santos is the Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology at Yale University. In addition to her work on the evolutionary origins of human cognition, Laurie is an expert on the science of happiness and the ways in which our minds lie to us about what makes us happy. Her Yale course, Psychology and the Good Life, teaches students how the science of psychology can provide important hints about how to make wiser choices and live a life that’s happier and more fulfilling. The class became Yale’s most popular course in over 300 years, with almost one out of four students enrolled. Her course has been featured in The New York Times, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, GQ Magazine, Slate and O! Magazine. The online version of the class — The Science of Well-Being on Coursera.org — has attracted more than 4.5 million learners from around the world. A winner of numerous awards both for her science and teaching, she was recently voted as one of Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” young minds, and was named in Time Magazine as a “Leading Campus Celebrity.” Her podcast, The Happiness Lab, is a top-3 Apple podcast which has attracted 150+ million downloads since its launch.
Daniel Schacter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Dan received his B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He subsequently developed a keen interest in amnesic disorders associated with various kinds of brain damage. He continued his...