Greater Good Together

Connect with the GGSC's Emiliana Simon-Thomas and Eve Ekman in weekly virtual sessions on finding well-being during coronavirus. We'll start with a grounding exercise and then practice one of the well-being exercises from Greater Good in Action.

Eve Ekman, Ph.D, LCSW is a Senior Fellow at theUniversity of California Berkeley Greater Good Science Center and Director of cultivating emotional balance training. Eve’s research interests were inspired by her experience as a medical social worker in the emergency department of San Francisco General Hospital coupled with her training in the applied emotion regulation and mindfulness intervention: Cultivating Emotional Balance, CEB.

Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas, Ph.D. is the science director of the Greater Good Science Center, where she oversees the GGSC’s fellowship program, is a co-instructor of its Science of Happiness online course, and helps run its Expanding Gratitude project. Emiliana is a leading expert on the neuroscience and psychology of compassion, kindness, gratitude, and other “pro-social” skills. She earned her doctorate in Cognition Brain and Behavior at UC Berkeley, where her dissertation used behavioral and neuroscience methods to examine how negative states like fear and aversion influence thinking and decision-making. During her postdoc, Emiliana transitioned to studying pro-social states like love of humanity, compassion, and awe. From there, Emiliana served as Associate Director/Senior Scientist at CCARE (the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University), focusing on how compassion benefits health, well-being, and psychosocial functioning. Today, Emiliana’s work spotlights the science that connects health and happiness to social affiliation, caregiving, and collaborative relationships, as she continues to examine the potential for – as well as the benefits of – living a more meaningful life.