Eve Ekman, Ph.D., MSW, Dacher Keltner, Ph.D, Elissa Epel, Ph.D, Dr. Jyothi Marbin and Jamil Zaki, Ph.D.
Eve Ekman, Ph.D., MSW, is the director of training at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. She is a UC Berkeley- and UCSF-trained contemplative social scientist and teacher in the fields of emotional awareness and burnout prevention.
Dr. Ekman’s trainings bring the science of happiness, resilience, compassion, mindfulness, and emotional awareness to individuals and organizations around the world. Her writing on empathy, burnout, and compassion has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, magazines, and books.
Dacher Keltner, Ph.D, is a founder of the Greater Good Science Center and its director. After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford University, Dacher (rhymes with “cracker”) has devoted his career to studying the nature of human goodness, conducting ground-breaking research on compassion, awe, laughter, and love. He is also a leading expert on social intelligence, the psychology of power, and the emotional bases of morality. He has written more than 100 scientific papers and two best-selling textbooks, Social Psychology and Understanding Emotions. More recently, he is the author of the best-selling book Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, and a co-editor of the Greater Good anthology, The Compassionate Instinct.
Dacher is an outstanding speaker who has received several national research and teaching awards. Wired has rated the podcasts of his “Human Emotion” course as one of the five best academic podcasts in the country. He has twice presented his research to His Holiness the Dalai Lama as part of a continuing dialogue between the Dalai Lama and scientists, and his work is featured regularly in major media outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, and NPR. In 2008, the Utne Reader named him as one of 50 visionaries who are changing our world.
Elissa Epel, Ph.D, is a Professor and Vice Chair at University of California, San Francisco, Department of Psychiatry. She studies how chronic stress can impact biological aging (including telomeres) and metabolic health throughout the lifespan, and how biobehavioral and contemplative interventions may promote stress resilience and physiological thriving. She also studies emotional and compulsive eating and effects of self regulation and environmental interventions on metabolic health.
Epel is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, president of Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, and co-chair of Mind and Life Institute Steering Council. She wrote “The Telomere Effect: A revolutionary approach to living younger, longer” with Liz Blackburn, a New York Times best seller.
Dr. Jyothi Marbin is Associate Clinical Professor and Associate Residency Program Director (APD) of Pediatrics, Director of the Pediatrics Leadership for the Underserved (PLUS) Residency Program and Director of Intern Selection for Pediatrics. A graduate of the PLUS program, Dr. Marbin became its director in the program’s tenth year, and subsequently revised its vision, mission, goals and objectives, and developed a framework to evaluate its community projects. She teaches a health equity leadership curriculum and created a partnership with Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland (BCHO) to allow residents to participate in PLUS. In addition to clinical teaching at BCHO and ZSFG, Dr. Marbin teaches pediatricians to help parents and caregivers quit smoking through the Clinical Effort Against Secondhand Smoke Exposure (CEASE) program. On becoming Director of Intern Selection, she and her team revised the selection rubric, implemented anti-bias training for the committee, and revised the ranking meeting process, doubling the number of matching UIM (underrepresented in medicine) interns in the program.
Jamil Zaki, Ph.D. is an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University. His research spans social influence, prosocial behavior, and especially empathy. He has pioneered a new perspective on empathy as a learnable skill, and much of his work focuses on training individuals, groups, and organizations to empathize more effectively.
Dr. Zaki received his BA in cognitive neuroscience from Boston University and his PhD in psychology from Columbia University, and conducted postdoctoral research at the Harvard Center for Brain Science. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles and received numerous research and teaching awards, most recently including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
In addition to his academic work, Dr. Zaki is active in outreach and public communication of science. He has written about the psychology of empathy and related phenomena for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker. His new book, The War for Kindness (Crown), focuses on building empathy under difficult circumstances.