IPPA Fellows 2015

Antonella Delle Fave, MD specialized in Clinical Psychology, is professor of Psychology at the Medical School, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. Her research work is centered on the study of psychological indicators of well-being, daily experience fluctuation, and the process of psychological selection across cultures and among individuals experiencing conditions of diversity and adversity. She developed intervention projects in the domains of health and education. Together with international partners she launched and implemented the project “Eudaimonic and Hedonic Happiness Investigation”, aimed at identifying well-being components across cultures. She is currently conducting research and clinical studies aimed at integrating the bio-psycho-social perspective of Western medicine and the Indian traditional view of health and disease.She contributed to the development of positive psychology, as founding member and President of the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA), the European Network of Positive Psychology (ENPP) and the Società Italiana di Psicologia Positiva (SIPP). Author of over 150 scientific articles and books, since 2010 she is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Happiness Studies.

Jane E. Dutton is the Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Business Administration and Psychology at the, University of Michigan and Professor of Psychology. She does research, teaches and works with organizations on issues related to how to bring out the best in employees and in organizations. She studies and writes about how people build high quality connections, how people craft their jobs, compassion at work (http://www.thecompassionlab.com/)  and how they construct self-identities that are strengthening. She is a co-founder of the Center for Positive Organizations (http://www.centerforpos.org/) at the Ross School of Business.

She has won research and teaching awards and has written more than 100 research papers and monographs(http://webuser.bus.umich.edu/janedut/). She leads workshops, builds intervention tools for bringing out the best in people (http://positiveorgs.bus.umich.edu/tools/), teaches in executive programs on positive leadership, and loves doing research, teaching and change around the general topic of positive leadership.

Scott Huebner, a graduate of Indiana  University, is a professor and former Director of the School Psychology Program in the Department of Psychology at the University of South Carolina. He is a Fellow in the American Psychological Association (Div. 16) and International Society for Quality of Life Studies and an elected member of the Society for the Study of School Psychology. His scholarly interests focus on the conceptualization, measurement, and application of positive psychology constructs in children. He is the author of more than 200 publications on child well-being and several youth well-being measures. He is also a co-editor of the Handbook of Positive Psychology in Schools.

Willibald Ruch, born in Carinthia, Austria, received his PhD from the University of Graz, Austria, and later worked at a number of universities in Germany and the UK. Between 1992 and 1998 he held a Heisenberg Fellowship, awarded by theGerman Research Foundation-DFG, and since 2002 he has been chair and full professor of personality and assessment in the Department of Psychology at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. He has served on the boards of several international societies (including the International Positive Psychology Association-IPPA, the European Association of Psychological Assessment-EAPA, and International Society of Humor Studies-ISHS) and was president of the ISHS twice. He was a member of the editorial board of a dozen scientific journals, co-editor of two book series, and co-authored about 250 journal articles and 5 books. He actively contributed to the development of positive psychology, as participant of the Akumal think tanks, leader of a pod, contributor to the “character strengths and virtues”-handbook, presenter at the Gallup Washington positive psychology summits, invited keynote speaker at international conferences, and founder and first president of the Swiss Positive Psychology Association (SWIPPA). His more recent interest in positive psychology is in character strengths and virtues and their role in the life of children and youth as well as adults. He and his team also work on training of character strengths, assessment of positive emotions, humor, laughter and cheerfulness. 

Carol D. Ryff, Ph.D., is Director of the Institute on Aging and Marie Jahoda Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research centers on the study of psychological well-being, an area in which she has developed multidimensional assessment scales that have been translated to more than 30 different languages and are used in research across diverse scientific fields. Investigations by Dr. Ryff and colleagues have addressed how psychological well-being varies by age, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnic/minority status, and cultural context as well as by the experiences, challenges, and transitions individuals confront as they age. Whether psychological well-being is protective of good physical health is also a major interest, with ongoing longitudinal investigations linking positive psychosocial factors to a wide array of biomarkers (neuroendocrine, immune, cardiovascular) as well as to neural circuitry. A guiding theme in much of this inquiry is human resilience – i.e., how some individuals are able to maintain, or regain, their well-being in the face of significant life challenge and what neurobiology underlies this capacity.Dr. Ryff has generated over 180 publications in the areas described above, and she currently directs the MIDUS (Midlife in the U.S.) longitudinal study, which is based on a large national sample of Americans, including twins. Funded by the National Institute on Aging, MIDUS II has become a major forum for studying health as an integrated biopsychosocial process. She is also Principal Investigator of MIDJA (Midlife in Japan), a parallel to the MIDUS investigation, for which she received an NIH Merit Award.