Work with thought leaders and academic experts in endocrine autonomic systems

Professor Lyubomirsky’s research interests include well-being, happiness, self-regulation, and talents. She is widely published, with well over 100 articles and chapters and four books, The How of Happiness (Penguin, 2007), The Myths of Happiness (Penguin, 2013), The How of Happiness Workbook (Penguin, 2008), and Designing Your Life (Avery, 2016). Professor Lyubomirsky has received numerous awards for her work, including the American Psychological Association’s Positive Psychology Prize (2015), the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (2009), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008-2009). She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association.

My core interests lie in understanding how children and adolescents perceive and interpret social signals and how emerging functional specificity of the developing brain supports this process. My approach primarily involves using the face processing system as a model domain. Faces are dynamic stimuli from which we extract many different kinds of information (e.g., gender, age, emotional state, mate potential, social status, trustworthiness, intentions, “person knowledge”). All of these processes must be executed accurately and rapidly for many faces over the course of a single day, making face processing among the most taxing perceptual challenges confronted by people in their day-to-day life. Given that faces are also the pre-eminent social signal, studying developmental changes in the behavioral and brain basis of face processing in typically developing individuals and in those affected by social-emotional disorders may index a core set of developmental changes within the broader social information processing system. I employ converging methodologies, including functional (fMRI) and structural magnetic resonance, and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) along with detailed behavioral paradigms in both typically developing populations and those with developmental disorders to examine development from early childhood to adulthood.

Dr. Kim's program of research aims to identify, understand, and intervene upon the dimensions of psychological well-being (sense of purpose in life, optimism) that reduce the risk of age-related conditions. <br> Around this topic, he has given invited lectures at Universities (Harvard, U. of Penn, MIT, Columbia U.), corporations (UnitedHealth Care, IDEO, AARP, Samsung), and he’s also been invited to speak at and join the working groups of national- and international-think-tanks (United Nations, OECD, Aspen Ideas Festival, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, The Task Force for Global Health, World Government Summit, National Academy of Sciences). He’s also been recognized as one of Forbe’s 30 Under 30 in Healthcare, recipient of the American Journal of Epidemiology's Paper of the Year Award, the American Psychological Association Division 20 (Aging) Early Career Achievement Award, and an Association for Psychological Science (APS) Rising Star. His insights have been featured in the: NY Times, Atlantic, BBC News, NPR, Washington Post. His research has been cited by policy statements/guidelines formulated by the: United Nations, National Academy of Sciences, American Heart Association, the U.S. Surgeon General. Population aging is one of the most important social trends of the 21st century. In both Canada and the U.S., the # of adults aged ≥65 is projected to increase by 45%-55% in the next 15 years. As societies grapple with the rising tide of chronic conditions, healthcare costs, and long-term care costs, it is imperative to develop a science that informs a more comprehensive approach to healthy aging. Dr. Kim’s overarching goal is to substantially help improve the psychological well-being and physical health of our rapidly growing population. In pursuit of this goal, his program of research revolves around 4 interwoven questions. He studies: 1) Several dimensions of psychological well-being (sense of purpose in life, optimism) and how they relate to health outcomes. 2) The behavioral, biological, and neural mechanisms underlying the association between psychological well-being and health. 3) How an individual’s psychological well-being interacts with the surrounding environment to influence behavioral and physical health outcomes; for example, at the meso-level (dyadic dynamics in couples, neighborhood contexts, altruism/volunteering) and the macro-level (social cohesion, social and racial disparities). 4) And he partners with non-profit/healthcare companies to conduct translational research that test scalable interventions.

I am a Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Psychology. I completed my doctoral studies in the interdisciplinary program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona, with a specialization in linguistic analysis and a minor concentration in second language processing. I then held a faculty position at the University of Illinois for four years (1996-2000), where I was a primary collaborator in pioneering a computer-enhanced Spanish language instruction curriculum consisting of mixed classroom and computer-assisted instruction. Prior to assuming my current position at Penn State, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi (2000-2001), where I was hired to implement the model for the Spanish language curriculum developed at Illinois.