Marco Angrisani, Ph.D., is a Senior Economist at the Center for Economic and Social Research and an Associate Research Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Southern California. His research spans financial, labor, and health economics, with a particular focus on the economics of aging and survey methodology, including sampling and weighting methods, questionnaire design, and survey harmonization. Dr. Angrisani is a member of the management team of the Understanding America Study (UAS) and a team member of the Gateway to Global Aging Data Repository. His recent work focuses on caregivers’ daily experiences and the ways caregiving responsibilities intersect with labor market outcomes. He also leads research examining individuals’ exposure to, use of, and attitudes toward artificial intelligence.

Rafael Batista is a postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. His research examines how AI shapes the way people think about and experience the world, influencing the beliefs they form and the decisions they make. He also studies financial decision-making, particularly the psychology behind how people spend, save, and borrow.

Rafael was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University's Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy. Before his PhD, he co-founded the Behavioral Science Team at Commonwealth Bank of Australia and conducted field experiments across East Africa with the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics. He continues to work with organizations and is currently consulting for UNICEF on behavioral data science. Additional information about his research can be found on rafaelmbatista.com.

Jeslyn Brouwers is a PhD student in Management and Organization at the USC Marshall School of Business.

Elizabeth is a PhD student in the Life Hacks Research Lab. She holds a B.S. in psychology from the University of Toronto. She is interested in the links between screen time and well-being and designing interventions to improve people's experiences using technology. Outside of the lab, she enjoys watching basketball, doing jigsaw puzzles, and spending time with her bunny.

Jenny Chatman is the Bank of America Dean of the Haas School of Business. Prior to becoming dean, she held the Paul J. Cortese Distinguished Professorship in the Management of Organizations Group.

In her research, teaching, and consulting work, she focuses on how organizations can leverage culture for strategic success and how diverse teams can optimize performance. Her award-winning research has shown, for example, how emphasizing innovation in the context of a strong culture increases firms’ financial success, how narcissistic leaders create organizational cultures lower in collaboration and integrity, and how norms to cooperate can cause members to blur differences among them, even if those differences are useful for group performance—suggesting that collaboration should be calibrated in diverse teams. In 2023, Chatman received the lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Management Organizational Behavior Division for her pioneering work that has changed the field.

Chatman is the Co-founder of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation. She runs the Leading Strategy Execution Through Culture executive education program and co-hosts the podcast The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer with Sameer Srivastava. She has served in many leadership roles at Haas and UC Berkeley over the years, including Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Acting Dean, and Interim Dean from August 2024 to July 2025. Chatman earned her PhD at UC Berkeley Haas, and her BA in psychology from UC Berkeley.

Vivienne Chi is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies how people's relationships with AI develop over time: how people learn to trust AI, how it shapes their choices and sense of agency, and what those interactions mean for well-being. Combining cognitive science with computational methods, her work aims to inform the design of AI systems that support people’s longer-term interests.

Yalda Daryani is a PhD candidate in social psychology at the University of Southern California, where she works in the Mind & Society Center with Daphna Oyserman and Norbert Schwarz. She studies how AI systems represent human culture and values, using natural language processing, cross-cultural studies, and behavioral experiments. Her recent work examines how large language models flatten cultural differences, whether frontier models capture how national cultures change over time, and how LLMs reason about moral content across languages. In 2026, she was a Google Public Policy Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology.

Danica Dillion is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Complexity Science Hub Vienna and The Ohio State University, where she studies how AI systems model human moral values and how they can be better aligned with people. Her research spans the growing role of large language models (LLMs) in moral advice and decision-making, the potential for LLMs to simulate human research participants, variation in moral beliefs across social network structures, and the relationships between religious beliefs and social scale across historical societies. She has also co-authored a benchmark for multicultural value alignment in LLMs. Her work has been published in journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, PNAS Nexus, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and featured in media outlets such as The New Yorker and Scientific American.

Lila DiMasi is a research coordinator working with Angela Duckworth and the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Penn. She is interested in social connection and how technology use affects how we engage with the people around us.

Nicholas Epley is the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science, and Director of the Roman Family Center for Decision Research, at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He studies social cognition—how thinking people think about other thinking people—to understand why smart people so routinely misunderstand each other. He has been awarded the 2008 Theoretical Innovation Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the 2011 Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, the 2015 Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science, and the 2018 Career Trajectory Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. He is the author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want (2014), and A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection (2026).

Grace Falgoust (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in Social Psychology and a master's candidate in Public Policy at Georgetown University, where she is advised by Dr. Kostadin Kushlev in the Happy Tech Lab. Her research examines how technology shapes wellbeing and translates that science into actionable policy recommendations for schools, governments, and workplaces—drawing on both quantitative and qualitative methods to do so.

Currently, she co-leads a research project investigating the real-world impacts of social media regulation on youth wellbeing. Before graduate school, she spent two years at the RAND Corporation contributing to peer-reviewed publications and research reports across defense, public health, and education policy. Outside of the lab, you can find her on DC's biking trails or watercoloring cards.

Dunigan is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the role of social connection in living a happy life, and what happens to our sense of connection when we turn to AI for companionship.

Evan Gold is an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing a B.A. degree in Integrative Biology (Class of 2027). He is a co-lead teaching and research assistant for CogSci 175, Mind, Machine, and Meaning. Additionally he has taught the student-led course Info 98: Becoming Tech Intentional. His research interest is how young people can learn to have healthier relationships with technology and he hopes to pursue graduate study in the area. He is also an oarsman for the Cal men's rowing team.

Ken Goldberg is William S. Floyd Distinguished Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley and an award-winning roboticist, filmmaker, artist and popular public speaker on AI and robotics. At UC Berkeley, Ken trains the next generation of researchers and entrepreneurs. He has published over 450 papers, 3 books, and holds 10 US Patents. Ken’s artwork has been featured in 70 art exhibits including the Whitney Biennial. He is a pioneer in technology and artistic visual expression, bridging the “two cultures” of art and science. With unique skills in communication and creative problem solving, invention, and thinking on the edge, Ken has presented over 600 invited lectures at events around the world.

I am an associate professor at Harvard Business School, an affiliate with Harvard’s Department of Psychology, and a member of the HBS AI Institute. My research bridges two interconnected areas focused on enhancing flourishing within groups and communities, reducing unhelpful emotions, and improving well-being. One line of my work examines group behavior, with specific attention to emotions and affective processes in social contexts. Through this work, I study how dynamics such as contagion and network structure shape group functioning. Building on the need to find scalable solutions for changing emotions, a second focus explores technology, particularly AI-driven systems, and their role in eliciting emotions and providing emotional support. As AI tools are increasingly adopted to address the growing well-being crisis, they offer a promising large-scale solution for enhancing emotional health while also posing challenges for human social relations. To address these questions, I combine behavioral experiments with computational modeling, applying lab-based insights to real-world contexts.

Jodi Halpern, MD, PhD holds a University Chair and is Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. Her work brings together psychiatry, philosophy, affective forecasting and decision neuroscience to elucidate how people imagine and influence their own and each other’s future health possibilities. Her book, From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice was called a “seminal work” by the Journal of the American Medical Association. Her upcoming book Remaking the Self in the Wake of Loss examines the role of empathy in post-traumatic growth. Dr. Halpern’s research articles focus on innovative technologies and ethics. She co-founded and is the Co-Director of the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science and the Public and leads the Berkeley Group for the Ethics and Regulation of Innovative Technology. Her current book project “Engineering Empathy” examines how AI-simulated empathy is changing personal and therapeutic relationships. She is engaged in policy, currently in creating guardrails to protect minors from risks associated with companion chatbots. She advised the California Senate on SB 243 which became the first law requiring chatbot companies to collect and report data on associated suicidality. Recent media interviews include NPR, KQED, ABC, PBS, CBC, France 5, Wired, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, and New Scientist. Halpern is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Fellowship, the Rockefeller Fellowship at Princeton and the 2022 Guggenheim Award in Health and Medicine. Halpern’s scholarship investigating empathic curiosity for therapeutic impact and to bridge societal divides is recognized worldwide, and in 2024 she received the Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award in Empathy and Healthcare from The International Network for Empathy in Healthcare.

Jeff Hancock is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, Founding Director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and Director of the Tech Impact & Policy Center. His research examines how social technologies like artificial intelligence and social media shape trust, well-being, and human behavior, with a focus on helping organizations and policymakers navigate the psychological impacts of emerging technologies.

David Evan Harris is a Chancellor’s Public Scholar at UC Berkeley and a continuing lecturer at the Haas School of Business. Harris teaches courses including AI Ethics for Leaders; Social Movements & Social Media; Civic Technology; and Scenario Planning & Futures Thinking. Harris is an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS); Center for Latin American Studies; Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership (EGAL); and the Business and Public Policy Group at UC Berkeley.

In his previous role at Meta (formerly Facebook), Harris managed teams of quantitative and qualitative researchers working on responsible AI, social impact, and civic integrity. During his close to five years with the company, he and his teams covered topic areas including AI fairness and inclusion; AI governance and accountability; global election integrity; misinformation; coordinated inauthentic behavior; hate speech; human rights; political violence; harassment and online safety for activists, journalists, and politicians; community organizing; civic participation; racial justice; authoritative information; volunteering and non-profit organizations.

At the Institute for the Future (IFTF), he served as research director, leading research on the future of media, philanthropy, governance, international development, and social movements from 2008-2018. Harris studied at the University of São Paulo (MS, Sociology) and UC Berkeley (BA, Political Economy of Environment & Development). As a student, he was an intern at the White House Council on Environmental Quality and a confidential assistant at the Office of Management and Budget, Natural Resources Division.

Harris is formally trained in sociology and specializes in methods including ethnography, in-depth interviews, aggregation of expert opinion, survey design, scenario planning, signals scanning, multi-stakeholder workshop facilitation and content analysis.

In 2004, he founded the Global Lives Project, a network of people working to build a video library of daily life around the world. Harris continues to support the Global Lives project with help of talented teams of UC Berkeley students through the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program.

Michael Inzlicht is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed at the Rotman School of Management and a Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology & Society. His lab studies mental effort, empathy, and how technology reshapes motivation and well-being. Recent work examines AI-generated empathy and why people reject the machine responses they rate most highly. He has ranked among the top 1% of most-cited psychologists worldwide for four consecutive years.

Sara Johansen, MD, leads mental health and well-being product policy at OpenAI. She partners across product, engineering, and design to develop evidence-informed features and safeguards that support mental health and wellbeing. She also helps direct research on how human–AI interactions affect wellbeing.

Previously, Sara was a Clinical Assistant Professor at Stanford University, where she founded and directed Stanford’s Digital Mental Health Clinic. She also held faculty affiliations with the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and the Graduate School of Business. Her work examined how digital technologies could expand access to mental health care, strengthen treatment delivery, and support wellbeing.

Sara is a practicing psychiatrist and earned her medical degree from Stanford University School of Medicine. Her clinical work remains central to her perspective on AI systems and human wellbeing.

Malte F. Jung is an Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University and the Nancy H. ’62 and Philip M. ’62 Young Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow. His InterPlay Research Studio brings a design studio practice and sensibility to research in information science and robotics. It develops new methods for studying interaction "in the wild" and works across engineering, design, and the social sciences to ask not only how we build AI systems, but how those systems transform the environments, relationships, and values they enter into. His work has appeared in PNAS, Scientific Reports, and the ACM CHI and HRI conferences, has received multiple best paper awards, and has been covered by Scientific American, Wired, and the BBC. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award. He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (with a minor in Psychology) from Stanford University and a diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford's Center for Work, Technology, and Organization.


Malte F. Jung is an Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University, where he leads the InterPlay Research Studio. The studio brings a design studio practice and sensibility to research in information science and robotics, developing new methods for studying interaction "in the wild" and asking not only how we build AI systems, but how those systems transform the environments, relationships, and values they enter into. His work has earned multiple best paper awards and an NSF CAREER Award, and has been covered by Scientific American, Wired, and the BBC. He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

Danielle Leibzon is an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing B.A. degrees in Molecular & Cell Biology and Public Health (Class of 2028). She is a Co-Lead Student Facilitator for Dr. Sahar Yousef's Cognitive Science 175 course, "Mind, Machine, and Meaning: Living Intentionally in the Digital Age," where she co-leads a team of 10 facilitators supporting 450 students. Her research with the course team examines how limiting screen time and practicing mindfulness affect digital dependence, attention, and social interaction.

Gracielle Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Psychology and Social Policy at Princeton University. Her research examines how people form expectations, beliefs, and social connections across interpersonal, parasocial, and human–AI relationships. More broadly, she studies how people come to trust, understand, and feel connected to social figures and technologies, and how these relationships shape social cognition and behavior.

Ryn Linthicum is the head of user well-being policy at Anthropic. Their work combines academic research with practical policy implementation to prevent the harmful misuse of frontier AI models. Ryn’s approach is informed by their background expertise in suicide and self-harm, child development, and machine learning. Prior to joining Anthropic, they led the global issue policy team for mental health at TikTok. Ryn holds a master of science degree in clinical psychology from Florida State University.

Yuning Liu is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Business School. Her research asks how digital technologies, including social media and AI, can be built to support user well-being and flourishing, from the perspective of user intention and motivation. Her work proceeds along three arms. First, she links objective behavioral traces to subjective experience on social media to unpack the mechanisms behind digital well-being. Second, she identifies user intentions from human–AI collaboration and tests experimentally whether reorienting models toward them improves user experience. Third, she works on policy translation: how social media and AI governance can move beyond access restrictions to reshape stakeholder institutions toward purpose-driven, pro-human outcomes. She holds a PhD from Harvard University, an MSc in Global Population Health from Harvard, and a Bachelor of Medicine from Peking University.

Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal was elected to the California State Assembly in November of 2022 to represent the 69th Assembly District. Assemblymember Lowenthal worked as an entrepreneur and business owner with a long, successful record of accomplishment in tech and telecom startups. Growing up and working in Long Beach, Josh committed himself to improve the community we live in by working to alleviate homelessness, help at-risk children, and create good, 21st-century jobs. Josh Lowenthal grew up in Long Beach, where he attended public schools. He worked as a local teacher, is a local business owner, and has three daughters in public schools.

Pattie Maes is the Germeshausen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab where she does research at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. She codirects the Media Lab's Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) research program and also serves as an affiliated faculty member to MIT's center for Neuro-Biological Engineering. Maes pioneered the concept of Software Agents in the 90s and remains focused on the question of how computer systems and digital devices might augment people and assist them with issues such as memory, learning, decision making, health and wellbeing.

Maes is the editor of four books, has published over 500 peer-reviewed articles, and is an editorial board member and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences. She is the recipient of several awards: Netguru selected her for "Hidden Heroes: the people who shaped technology (2022), Time Magazine has included several of her designs in its annual list of inventions of the year; The American Association for Artificial Intelligence gave her the "classic paper 2012" prize, awarded to the most influential AI paper of the year, Fast Company named her one of 50 most influential designers (2011); Newsweek picked her as one of the "100 Americans to watch for" (2000); TIME Digital selected her as a member of the “Cyber Elite,” the top 50 technological pioneers of the high-tech world; the World Economic Forum honored her with the title "Global Leader for Tomorrow"; Ars Electronica awarded her the 1995 World Wide Web category prize; and in 2025 she was recognized with the "Lifetime Achievement Award in Human Computer Interaction" by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She also received honorary doctorates from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium and Open Universiteit, Netherlands, and has given several TED talks.

In addition to her academic endeavors, Maes has been an active entrepreneur as co-founder of several venture-backed companies, including Firefly Networks (sold to Microsoft), Open Ratings (sold to Dun & Bradstreet) and Tulip Co (privately held). Prior to becoming a MIT Media Lab professor, Maes received her BA and PhD degrees in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium and later joined the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab as a visiting professor and a research scientist working with AI luminaries Marvin Minsky and Rodney Brooks.

Kibum Moon is a Ph.D. candidate in Psychology at Georgetown University. His research explores human creativity and well-being in the context of AI and digital technologies. His recent work examines how generative AI makes individual work appear more creative while narrowing the diversity of human ideas. His broader goal is to understand the conditions under which AI and digital technologies can expand human creative potential and support digital well-being. To address these questions at scale, he integrates computational methods with psychological theory, combining natural language processing, machine learning, Bayesian modeling, and behavioral experiments. His work has been published in journals such as Nature Human Behaviour and featured in major media outlets, including The New York Times and CNN.

Don Norman is Distinguished Professor (emeritus), Founder and first Director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego. He has been a Vice President of Advanced Technology at Apple and an executive at HP. He is co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, fellow of numerous societies with honorary degrees from Delft, Padua, and San Marino. He received, a lifetime achievement award from ACM’s Computer-Human Interaction group, the President’s lifetime achievement award from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, the Sir Misha Black Medal for distinguished service to design education from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1821, London, UK, the Design Guru Award from The Institute of Design, JK Lakshmipat University, Jaipur India. In 2022 he received the Frontier Design Prize from the World Design Cities Conference and the Design Innovation Institute, Shanghai with guidance from the Shanghai Municipal government. He is currently an Honorary Professor and Advisor, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University (Shanghai) and on the International Advisory Board of the School of Design at Hong Kong Polytech and was a distinguished visiting professor at the Korean Advanced Institute of Technology for three years. He has published 21 books translated into over 20 languages including Emotional Design and Design of Everyday Things. His latest book is “Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered."