Our Team

Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD
Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD, founder of Positive Health, is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology and the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Also the founder of positive psychology and learned helplessness, Seligman is a world-renowned expert on depression, optimism, and pessimism. He is well-known in academic and clinical circles and is a best-selling author.
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Ed Diener, PhD
Ed Diener, PhD, is the Joseph R. Smiley Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. Diener's research focuses on the measurement of well-being; temperament and personality influences on well-being; theories of well-being; connection between income and well-being; and cultural influences on well-being.
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Laura Kubzansky, PhD, MPH
Laura Kubzansky, PhD, MPH, is a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. She has published extensively on the role of psychological and social factors in health, with a particular focus on the effects of stress and emotion on heart disease.
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H. Andrew Schwartz
Andy is a computational linguist focused on large and scalable language analyses for health and social sciences. Utilizing natural language processing and machine learning techniques he has discovered new behavioral and psychological factors of health and well-being as manifest through language in social media. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida in 2011, with research focused on acquiring lexical semantic knowledge from the Web. His recent work has been featured in WIRED and The Atlantic: Cities.
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Laurence Steinberg, PhD
Laurence Steinberg, PhD, is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology at Temple University. As one of the world’s leading authorities on psychological development during adolescence, Steinberg’s research has focused on a range of topics, including adolescent brain development, risk-taking and decision-making, mental health, family relationships, after-school employment, school achievement, and juvenile justice.
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Christopher Peterson
Christopher Peterson was at the University of Michigan, where he was professor of psychology and organizational studies and former director of clinical training. He held the appointment of Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, in recognition of his contributions to teaching. Peterson was among the 100 most widely cited psychologists in the world. He was a member of the Positive Psychology Steering Committee, a consulting editor to the Journal of Positive Psychology, Perspectives on Psychological Science, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Positive Psychology Book Series Editor for Oxford University Press. He authored A Primer in Positive Psychology, published in 2006 by Oxford University Press, as well as the forthcoming Pursuing the Good Life, selections of hisPT blog column.
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Louis Tay
Louis Tay is an Assistant Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Purdue University. He received his B.A. in Psychology (with Merit) from National University of Singapore (2004) and a First Class Honors (2005) at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
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Lyle H. Ungar
Dr. Lyle Ungar is a Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also holds appointments in multiple departments in the schools of Engineering, Arts and Sciences, Medicine, and Business. Dr. Ungar received a B.S. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. He has published over 200 articles and is co-inventor on eleven patents. His research areas include machine learning, data and text mining, and psychology, with a current focus on statistical natural language processing, spectral methods, and the use of social media understand the psychology of individuals and communities.
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Johannes Eichstaedt
Johannes C. Eichstaedt is Marty Seligman’s PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded the World Well-Being Project in 2011. He was elected an Emerging Leader in Science & Society by the American Association for Advancement of Science. Johannes received a B.S. in Physics & Philosophy from King’s College, London, a M.S. in Particle Physics from the University of Chicago, a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and is now in clinical psychology training in addition to his PhD research. As a computational psychologist, Johannes works on ways to measure the psychological states of large populations in space and time using social media, text mining and serious computing, to visualize them in clever new ways borrowed from Physics, and to use them to understand and predict health outcomes like heart disease and societal ills like crime.
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Christopher B. Forrest, MD, PhD
Christopher Forrest is a Professor of Pediatrics and Health Care Management at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His research unit focuses on the theory and measurement of health across the life course, value in pediatric healthcare, and delivery system transformation.
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