Sarah N. Ssali, PhD, is an Associate Professor and Dean, School of Gender Studies (Makerere University) where Gendered Identities, Masculinities and Men’s Studies are taught. She is also the Director, ARUA Centre of Excellence in Notions of Identity in Africa. She is a Social Scientist with a PhD in International Health Studies. She has vast research experience as Principal or co-Principal Investigator, using both qualitative and quantitative research methods and designs including surveys, stepped wedge designs, social networks analysis, ethnographic methods, life histories, narratives. She has researched and published in health systems, health financing, HIV and AIDS, post conflict settings, hidden behaviours, minorities, institutionalised identities, state policy and practice. She also trained in Stepping Stones. Gender and ethics underpin her work. She teaches Gender and the State, Research Methods, Fundamentals of Social Science and Health and Institutions and social transformation, including how certain behaviours and identities become normalized and dominant.

I was born in North Carolina and studied English Literature at Duke University. After graduation, I discovered my passion for working with children and child advocacy while volunteering as a CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate), which prompted me to obtain an M.A. in Developmental Psychopathology at the Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Following a year of work on a research project with mothers addicted to opioids and their children, I attended the University of Vermont, where I earned my Ph.D. in clinical psychology under Dr. Rex Forehand, who taught me Parent Management Training as a clinical tool and developed my interest and expertise in research on families impacted by Major Depressive Disorder. I then spent several years at the University of North Carolina as a postdoctoral fellow studying African American single mother families with Dr. Deborah Jones. I served on the faculty at Clark University in Worcester, MA, and at the University of Georgia, in Athens, before joining Georgia State University.

My research program has focused on (a) exploring parenting behaviors associated with youth well-being and psychopathology, and (b) testing prevention and intervention programs designed to increase youth well-being across a number of populations.

My research has focused on developing multi-method assessments for measuring children’s empathy, especially their empathic happiness, and understanding its role in children’s healthy social development, positive self-perceptions, and mental health. I was recently awarded a Visionary Grant from the American Psychological Foundation (The Neurobiology of Sharing Others’ Happiness: A Clue to Understanding Children’s Aggression?) and a Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (Neural Processes Underlying Interpretations of Emotions in Children at Risk for Depression) to investigate children’s empathic responses to others’ sadness and happiness with novel designs that employ behavioral, cognitive, affective, physiological, and neural measurements. My training to conduct this research included an NIMH Fellowship in Mental Health as an undergraduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, an NIMH-NRSA fellowship (Vulnerability to Psychopathology in Preschool-Aged Children of Depressed and Well Mothers) as a graduate student at Emory University, and an NIMH NRSA fellowship (Neurobehavioral Aspects of Personality and Psychopathology) as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota. I am currently an associate professor of clinical psychology at Georgia State University (GSU) where my research evaluates programs that enhance children’s capacity for empathic happiness and parents’ skills for fostering children’s prosocial motivations and healthy empathy.

Michal Reifen Tagar, PhD is an assistant professor (senior lecturer) at the IDC school of Psychology, Herzliya in Israel, and co-director of the Intergroup Conflict and Reconciliation Lab. In her work, she seeks to better understand the psychological factors driving social conflict, and in particular intragroup forces that serve to create, perpetuate, escalate, and assuage intergroup conflict. Currently, Dr. Reifen Tagar is focusing on the development of conflict-related worldviews, and on barriers to political deliberation within societies and how to overcome them. Dr. Reifen Tagar completed her M.A. as part of the U.S. State Department Special Program on Conflict Resolution as a Fulbright Scholar, and received her PhD at the University of Minnesota. Earlier in her career, Dr. Reifen Tagar worked in policy development on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and was a visiting scholar at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Allison Troy is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Franklin & Marshall College. She received her BA in Psychology from North Carolina State University, and her MA and PhD in Affect/Social Psychology from the University of Denver under the mentorship of Dr. Iris Mauss. Dr. Troy’s research focuses on the relationships between emotion regulation and mental health in adults, with a particular emphasis on understanding how emotion regulation contributes to resilience to stress. Much of her research has focused on measuring individual differences in emotion regulation using multi-method paradigms (i.e., self-report, physiology, and behavior) to predict psychological health. In more recent work, Dr. Troy has focused on understanding how the links between emotion regulation and mental health are powerfully moderated by context, including the types of stressors that people face (e.g., stressor controllability) as well as the socio-cultural contexts that individuals inhabit (e.g., socioeconomic status). In current projects, Dr. Troy is investigating the effects of emotion regulation on mental and physical health in the aftermath of racial discrimination and political distress, respectively.

Dr. Brett Ford is the director of the Affective Science & Health Laboratory at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. in social-personality from the University of California, Berkeley after receiving a B.A. in psychology and M.A. in social-personality psychology from Boston College. Her research centers on two inter-related questions. First, what do people believe about emotions? Second, what strategies do people use to regulate their emotions? Using multi-method and interdisciplinary approaches, she examines the nature of these beliefs and strategies, the factors that shape them, and their implications for well-being and healthy functioning.

Emily Falk is an Associate Professor of Communication, Psychology, and Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Falk employs a variety of methods drawn from communication science, neuroscience and psychology. Her work traverses levels of analysis from individual behavior, to diffusion in group and population level media effects. In particular, Prof. Falk is interested in predicting behavior change following exposure to persuasive messages and in understanding what makes successful ideas spread (e.g. through social networks, through cultures). Prof. Falk is also interested in developing methods to predict the efficacy of persuasive communication at the population level. At present, much of her research focuses on health communication, including recent work exploring neural predictors of increased sunscreen use, neural predictors of smoking reduction, and linking neural responses to health messages to population level behavioral outcomes; other areas of interest include political communication, cross-cultural communication, and the spread of culture, social norms and sticky ideas. Prof. Falk received her bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience from Brown University, and her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).