IPPA Award Winners 2021

Although the modern positive psychology movement was young, Ed’s presidency occurred decades into a well-established career. With approximately 400 publications and more than a quarter-million citations, Ed Diener was among the most highly cited scientists in history, across all disciplines. His pioneering research on subjective well-being helped lay the scientific foundations for positive psychology. It is hard to emphasize enough the courage it took for Ed, in the early 1980s, to study a topic that was widely dismissed as frivolous. Across four decades, Ed and his research collaborators explored a wide range of questions relating to happiness: its measurement, its effects on health, its relation to income, its cultural variations, its causes, and many other topics.

Ed was also a dedicated teacher, known equally for his love of data and his quirky sense of humor. Undergraduate students at the University of Illinois, where Ed taught from1974 to 2008, will recall him dressing as Mephistopheles in a skit in which he tried to coax professor Diener into taking “happiness shortcuts.” His students at the MAPP program at the University of Pennsylvania will remember how animated he became when he discussed tables and figures of data. His graduate students will remember him for his excellent mentorship and generosity with authorship. His family members will recall that he was not only a husband and father but also a frequent collaborator—having published 30 times with his wife and children.

Finally, Ed exemplified so many of the concepts that are at the heart of positive psychology. He was intellectually humble and he spoke to colleagues and laypeople with respect. He was generous, funny, creative, and hardworking.

In the years since, she has contributed to IPPA’s growth by recruiting members, managing strategic initiatives, producing member programming, and establishing opportunities for hundreds of volunteer leaders to advance the field through IPPA. She currently supports efforts to bridge research and practice and develop professional guidance for practitioners as a member of IPPA’s Council of Advisors. As the founder of Ardent Wellbeing, she helps nonprofit and government organizations engage stakeholders and craft policy that supports individual and collective well-being. She wishes to thank IPPA’s Board of Directors and volunteer leaders, past and present, especially James Pawelski, Leona Brandwene, David Pollay, Lea Waters, Carmelo Vazquez, and Tayyab Rashid, for the tremendous honor of serving with them on such a worthy mission.

She is Professor of the Practice and Director of the ITAM Center for Wellbeing Studies at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, in Mexico City. She created the first university-based positive psychology program in Spanish in 2008 at the Universidad Iberoamericana, and was the founding director of the Instituto de Ciencias de la Felicidad at Universidad Tecmilenio. She is a lecturer for the University of Pennsylvania´s LPS Online Certificate in Applied Positive Psychology, for which she has designed three positive psychology courses.

Margarita has been on the faculty of graduate programs in Family Therapy and in Counseling and is a co-founder of Grupo Campos Elíseos, a training institute for psychotherapists. She is the president of the Mexican Positive Psychology Society, is on the board of advisors of IPPA, and is a member of the leadership team of IPPA´s Clinical Division, where she leads a monthly peer consultation group for psychotherapists.

Margarita is the author of Positive Identities: Positive Psychology and Narrative Practices. An eight-week online workshop based on this book was empirically shown to increase well-being and reduce burnout during the Covid19 pandemic. Margarita also loves the diffusion of positive psychology and hosts the podcast Psicología y Felicidad.

Johannes is a computational social scientist focused on measuring and characterizing health and well-being from social media, and on introducing AI-based text analysis to the social sciences. Ten years ago, he co-founded the World Well-Being Project, then a research group dedicated to measuring the subjective well-being of large populations through social media.

Johannes’ papers have accrued over 5,000 citations across more than 50 publications.

In 2020 johannes and his team published a paper in PNAS that benchmarked and validated different methods of measuring subjective well-being from social media. These results have become the basis for big data measurement of the subjective well-being of populations.

Johannes has presented his work in the United Nations General Assembly and at the OECD World Forum and has been elected as an Emerging Leader in Science & Society by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Johannes’ work has been featured in over 100 articles in the international press, with 3 articles in the New York Times in 2020 alone.

He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cardiovascular epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. His lab focuses on older adults, and the overarching goal of his lab is 1) identify, 2) understand, and 3) intervene upon the individual and environmental determinants of psychological wellbeing that enhance healthy behaviors and reduce risk of chronic conditions. For this work he has been recognized as one of Forbes 30 Under 30, an Association for Psychological Science Rising Star, and American Psychological Association Division 20’s Early Career Achievement Award. He enjoys spending time at the intersection of several disciplines and has published in a range of journals including: PNAS, JAMA Psychiatry, Circulation, Stroke, the American Journal of Epidemiology, and Milbank Quarterly. He notes that none of this would have been possible without the incredible mentorship that he received from people like: Drs Christopher Peterson, Laura Kubzansky, Tyler VanderWeele, Jacqui Smith, Carol Ryff, and Vic Strecher. He is also deeply grateful for his tremendous collaborators and trainees.

He completed a Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Southern California and an MA in Experimental Psychology at the College of William and Mary. Broadly speaking, Dr. Newman is interested in understanding well-being in daily life and relies heavily on daily diary and Ecological Momentary Assessment methods. He has published 16 journal articles and book chapters, including two first authored papers at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology as well as first authored papers at Social Psychological and Personality Science, Journal of Personality, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Emotion, Journal of Positive Psychology, and Journal of Happiness Studies. His research has been covered by various media outlets, including the Atlantic and Psychology Today. He has received two grants (one as PI and one as Co-I) from the John Templeton Foundation to study the nature of gratitude to God in daily life. He has also received two grants from the National Science Foundation to conduct cross-cultural research on well-being in Japan and South Korea.

Dr. Allen’s research is motivated by the global concern that one in three young people do not feel like they belong to school, despite a student’s sense of school belonging (i.e., feeling respected, accepted, and valued at school) associated strongly with long-term implications for health and wellbeing. Her Ph.D., “In Pursuit of Belonging: A socio-ecological perspective of school belonging in secondary school”  received outstanding reviews from my two International thesis examiners from New Zealand and the United Kingdom. In Australia, her thesis was awarded the prestigious ‘Award for Excellent PhD Thesis in Psychology’ by the Australian Psychological Society. The thesis was also awarded the ‘Psychology of Relationships Thesis Award’ by the Psychology of Relationships Interest Group, a division within the Australian Psychological Society. A major publication to emerge from her Ph.D. has become the most cited paper on school belonging published in the last five years pointing to the rigour of her research. Publications that emerged from her Ph.D research have been used in important international publications, cited in government-level policy for student wellbeing and adopted by several international Graduate courses.

Scott completed his Postdoctoral Scholarship in Evaluation, Statistics, and Measurement at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, and his PhD in
Evaluation and Applied Research Methods and a co-concentration in Positive Organizational Psychology from Claremont Graduate University.

Scott is currently the President-Elect of the Positive Work and Organizations Division and will assume the presidency after the 2021 World Congress. Dr. Kim Cameron sat on his dissertation titled “Evaluating Employee Positive Functioning and Performance: A Positive Work and Organizations Approach,” which contributed four studies on the evaluation of positive psychology interventions and validated four new theory-driven building blocks in addition to Seligman’s PERMA model. To date, Scott has over 20 publications and numerous manuscripts under review and in preparation in top tier positive psychology and management journals, such as the Journal of Positive Psychology and the International Journal of Management Reviews (Impact Factor = 8.6). Most of his published research uses advanced quantitative analytic methods, such as meta-analysis, item response theory, factor analytic methods, and multitrait-multimethod analyses to measure aspects of employee flourishing.

Holding a PhD in Positive Developmental Psychology at Claremont Graduate University, he was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Lecturer at the California State University, Los Angeles. Broadly defined, his research interests include positive lifespan developmental psychology, with specific focuses on flow, autotelic personality, vital/meaningful engagement, and positive aging. His dissertation examined the age-related differences and long-term changes in flow experiences across adulthood in various domains using various operationalizations. His research can be found in various peer-reviewed, academic journals, such as The Journal of Positive Psychology and The Journal of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences.

Her main research and practice interests focus on meaning in life, positive psychology, existential psychology, spirituality, positive change and growth. She is the founder and head of the ‘Compass’ Institute for the Study and Application of Meaning in life, and the head of the Academic Training Program for Logotherapy (meaning-oriented psychotherapy) at Tel-Aviv University. She displayed many years of enormous innovation and scholarship in the science of spirituality and meaning in life, and her multiple current and future projects in this space, further validates that importance for the field. Her empirical work adopts a broad perspective, using various methodologies, to explore these topics across populations and diverse cultural subgroups and professionals, following adversity and transformative life experiences, as well as developmentally throughout the lifespan from childhood and adolescence to late adulthood. Her attempts to create an integrative framework involves the development of evidence-based models, and the creation and validation of several new measurement scales, that have been translated to several languages. She published scholarly journal articles and several books on these topics, and is currently working on an in-depth exploration of the interplay between character strengths, synchronicity, growth processes, and wholeness with spirituality, meaning and well-being.

Translating research to practice using diverse formats (books, conferences, licensed training packages, online courses, class and staff room resources, podcasts, publications and webinars), they are passionate about delivering multiple opportunities to build capability and capacity for wellbeing across the education sector – both nationally and internationally. Together they wrote, The Educators’ Guide to Whole-school Wellbeing: A Practical Guide to Getting Started, Best-practice Process and Effective Implementation (Routledge, 2020), described by Aaron Jarden, University of Melbourne, as “one of the best books I’ve read in the field of positive psychology – in my top 5 (out of hundreds)…Nothing less than a masterclass on application and implementation science of wellbeing in education…” and have run the Wellbeing in Education NZ (WENZ) Conferences since 2017. Other highlights include regional Wellbeing Communities of Practice involving hundreds of schools, enabling all NZ schools to access their wellbeing programmes via government funding, and three seasons of the Bringing Wellbeing to Life Podcast.

Translating research to practice using diverse formats (books, conferences, licensed training packages, online courses, class and staff room resources, podcasts, publications and webinars), they are passionate about delivering multiple opportunities to build capability and capacity for wellbeing across the education sector – both nationally and internationally. Together they wrote, The Educators’ Guide to Whole-school Wellbeing: A Practical Guide to Getting Started, Best-practice Process and Effective Implementation (Routledge, 2020), described by Aaron Jarden, University of Melbourne, as “one of the best books I’ve read in the field of positive psychology – in my top 5 (out of hundreds)…Nothing less than a masterclass on application and implementation science of wellbeing in education…” and have run the Wellbeing in Education NZ (WENZ) Conferences since 2017. Other highlights include regional Wellbeing Communities of Practice involving hundreds of schools, enabling all NZ schools to access their wellbeing programmes via government funding, and three seasons of the Bringing Wellbeing to Life Podcast.

His research spans theories in values education, with special emphasis on the notions of character strengths and virtues. He has written extensively on themes in general education, moral education, educational psychology, and moral philosophy, and sees himself essentially as a bridge-builder between philosophy and social science. Kristjánsson is the author of 8 books, including Virtues and Vices in Positive Psychology (C.U.P., 2013). He has published over 150 articles in international journals and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Moral Education. In 2011 he was presented with the Ása Guðmundsdóttir Wright Award, the most prestigious scholarly award given to an Icelandic academic across the Sciences and Humanities. In 2016 he won the Society for Educational Studies Prize for the best U.K. Education book of 2015. Kristjánsson was a founding member of the Steering Group of the International Positive Education Network, and Chair of the Paper Selection Committee for its first festival in Dallas, Texas, 2016. He is an invited Keynote Speaker for the European Conference of Positive Psychology, Iceland, 2022.

She has more than 250 publications in the field of behavioral medicine and positive psychology.  She and her team have examined positive psychological factors that predict better health/survival over 17 years in HIV, and/or protect health in a nationwide sample. These include positive affect/positive emotional expression, meaning, compassion, optimism, self-efficacy, active patient involvement, positive states of mind, personality (creative interactors), distress tolerance, conscientiousness, relaxation practice, coping, and recovery from trauma. Aspects of spirituality that predict survival or slower disease progression in HIV include having a positive view of God and believing that God will forgive you, being able to increase in spirituality after the HIV diagnosis, having a spiritual practice, spiritual reframing, and overcoming spiritual guilt. She and her team have also identified relationships of positive psychological factors with biological markers such as inflammation (CRP), oxytocin, cortisol, and immune measures. She is currently the PI on a Templeton funded grant which is the 6 year follow-up of a nationwide study examining the predictive power of positive psychological factors and spirituality for health, and is the current President of the American Psychosomatic Society.

Her work focuses on improving well-being, optimizing performance and development, and achieving and measuring positive outcomes and social impact for organizations in the U.S., the Philippines, and internationally.

She has 19 years of diverse professional experience across the business, nonprofit, education, social enterprise, and public sectors, including co-founding a school for social entrepreneurship in the Philippines where she taught a class on character development based on positive psychology.

Vicki is pursuing a PhD in Positive Organizational Psychology with a co-concentration in Evaluation at Claremont Graduate University and received a Stuart Oskamp Fellowship. Her current research focuses on understanding the well-being of social entrepreneurs and how to design positive organizational psychology interventions to improve well-being. She is a principal consultant for the CGU-Accenture Talent Innovation Lab and an evaluation consultant for the Claremont Evaluation Center. Her team from CGU was a finalist at IPPA’s 4^th Positive Organizational Intervention Challenge.

Vicki holds an MPA in Public & Nonprofit Management & Policy from New York University and serves on the Executive Committee of the IPPA Work & Organizations Division.

He teaches organizational psychology at the University of Vienna and the University of Klagenfurt and has been researching and publishing on the topic of leadership for more than 15 years As one of Europe’s leading scholars on Positive Leadership he developed the PERMA-Lead model and connects scientific research to practical management issues. His books about Positive Leadership introduces the wide-ranging research that shapes this revolutionary leadership-style and, most important, it describes many field-tested tools to implement this approach. PERMA-Lead presents a new, evidence-based, and practical Positive Leadership concept supported by many studies. The books also offers a comprehensive “toolbox” for implementing Positive Leadership. They are therefore a real treasure chest for managers, trainers, personnel developers, coaches, and everyone who professionally works with executives. In addition, guest authors from various companies and organizations such as Lidl, dm, IKEA, SOS Kinderdorf and T-Systems provide practical insights into how they successfully implement this leadership approach. Markus Ebner is member of the “Board of Directors” of the Austrian Positive Psychology Association (APPA).

After receiving her Ph.D. in General and Clinical Psychology in 2003, she developed her research and teaching activities focusing on the integration between positive and clinical psychology. Since 2006 she has been teaching the first academic course on Positive Psychology available in Italy entitled “Clinical Applications of Positive Psychology” and since 2016 Dr Ruini also teaches the course “Clinical Psychology”. In 2017 Chiara Ruini has authored the book entitled “Positive Psychology in the Clinical Domains” published by Springer . She has  authored more than 80 articles published in peer-reviewed international journals. She is actually Past President for the Italian Society of Positive Psychology and  serves the Editorial Boards for international Journals such as the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, the Journal of Happiness Studies; Applied Psychology Health and Well-being.  Her research interests are concerned with Positive Psychology, Clinical Psychology,  and positive interventions. She developed innovative interventions for the promotion of well-being in special populations (children,  adolescents, older adults and populations with physical and mental disorders), with a particular emphasis on the treatment of depression by enhancing dimensions of eudaimonia.

She holds a PhD and an MA in Personality and Social Psychology from the University of California, Davis, and a BA in Psychology from Grove City College.  Schnitker studies virtue and character development in adolescents and emerging adults, with a focus on the role of spirituality and religion in virtue formation. She specializes in the study of patience, self-control, gratitude, generosity, and thrift.  Schnitker has procured more than $7 million in funding as a principal investigator on multiple research grants, and she has published in a variety of scientific journals and edited volumes.  Schnitker is an Associate Editor for Psychology of Religion and Spirituality and an Editorial Board member for Journal of Research in Personality. She is a dedicated mentor, having served as dissertation advisor for more than 20 doctoral students, whom she helps to cultivate intellectual virtues alongside scientific competencies. She is the recipient of the Virginia Sexton American Psychological Association’s Division 36 Mentoring Award and Student International Positive Psychology Association Mentor Award.

Her research on positive psychological approaches to equity, diversity and inclusion in organizations, and cultural factors affecting well-being have received several awards and honors. She was the Founding President of the Work & Organizations Division of IPPA, Co-Founder of the Western Positive Psychology Association, Co-Founder of the Positive Organizational Inclusion Scholarship on Equity and Diversity (POISED) micro-community, and Co-Editor of the International Journal of Wellbeing. Across these roles, Meg has implemented various initiatives such as launching a positive work and organizations newsletter, editing special issues, and organizing workshops to deepen conversations on positive psychology in other disciplines. Via these programs, Meg has mentored students and colleagues new to the field and built these groups from the ground up to move forward positive psychology research, scholarship, dissemination, and practice. Her goal is to equip those new to positive psychology to develop into strong contributors who build and expand the field. As such, her mentees have held key leadership positions within and beyond IPPA, have published impactful positive psychology research, and made critical contributions to positive psychology practice.

I am honoured to be recognized in this manner by IPPA and its student members.

I am privileged to be surrounded by curious, bright, and motivated undergraduate students, both in the classroom (including a Psychology of Well-Being seminar) and in my lab. I strive to mentor students through the lens of self-determination theory, supporting their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness and modelling an ethic of integrity and reflectiveness. My students have contributed meaningfully to research on such topics as apology willingness; mindfulness and self-regulation; language, stigma, and mental health; other-oriented hope; nature involvement and well-being; and implicit theories of well-being. They have been co-authors on publications on these topics; on several occasions, they have been first authors.

My university identifies ‘students-first’ and ‘student-engaged research’ as two key pillars within its mission. Within that context, I strive to embody student-centered teaching and research as applied especially to well-being studies. I am grateful for this recognition by an organization whose members have contributed so significantly to this field.