J. Lawrence Aber

New York University

Lawrence Aber is one of the world’s leading experts on fostering social-emotional learning and resilience among children and youth at risk. He is currently the Willner Family Professor of Psychology and Public Policy at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and University Professor at New York University, where he also serves as board chair of its Institute of Human Development and Social Change and co-director of the international research center Global TIES for Children. In rigorous, prospective studies, Aber has demonstrated how early adversity (especially poverty and violence at multiple levels of the human ecology) leads to children’s problem behavior as mediated by social-cognitive processes. He also is known for his analysis of the impacts of innovative policies and practices on children’s academic, social, and emotional development. His collection of randomized controlled trials of social-emotional and academic learning interventions in the context of global crises represents some of his important empirical contributions. He and his collaborators have reported important findings about the impacts of these interventions in Syrian refugee settings in Lebanon and crisis settings in Niger. Aber’s exceptional work proves that rigorous psychological science and intervention trials can foster children’s well-being in conflict-torn contexts.

Eric Johnson

Columbia University

Eric Johnson has been a leader in bringing behavioral science into public policy. For almost 40 years, Johnson has studied the processes used to make everyday choices. His work has revealed the cognitive mechanisms that underlie better choices, an area known as choice architecture, informing how best to present choices to maximize desirable outcomes. The inaugural holder of the Norman Eig Chair of Business, the Founder and Director of the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia University, and an advisor to the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Johnson has made important methodological and conceptual contributions to decision-making research. He developed a method that uses a computer mouse to measure moment-by-moment changes in people’s attention as they make decisions. This method—which is easier to implement than eye tracking—is now widely used in a variety of applied domains, including research on consumer finance and food choices. His game-changing work has helped foster policies that increase organ donations and support environmentally friendly laws and regulations. Johnson has demonstrated not only how basic research can lead to valuable real-world applications, but how data from these applications can inform and enrich basic theory and research.  

Christina Maslach

University of California, Berkeley

Christina Maslach pioneered research on the definition, predictors, and measurement of job burnout, an experience of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy caused by chronic job stressors. She also has focused on finding interventions for burnout. A professor of psychology (Emerita) and a core researcher at the Healthy Workplaces Center at the University of California, Berkeley, she created the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the most widely used instrument for measuring job burnout. Her groundbreaking work is the basis for the World Health Organization’s 2019 decision to include burnout as an occupational phenomenon with negative health effects in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). Her research has garnered widespread recognition. Her longitudinal research on early burnout predictors was honored in 2012 as one of the 50 most outstanding articles published by the world’s 300 top management journals. In 2021, Business Insider named her one of the top 100 people transforming business. Maslach’s indispensable work cuts across health, personality, social, industrial/organizational, and clinical psychology. Her research has spurred countless scholars to investigate burnout and organizations to take steps to alleviate it.