People

Dr. Robert L. Selman Professor of Education and Human Development; Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at Harvard University; Former Director of The First College of Harvard Medical School; Professor of Psychology of Boston Children's Hospital; Researcher Fulbright; Fellow of the American Psychological Association; Former Chairman of Piaget Association. Currently, he studies the developmental and cultural antecedents of the capacity of children and youth to form and maintain positive social relationships, and ways to prevent negative educational, social, and health outcomes.

Helen Haste is Professor Emerita in Psychology at the University of Bath, UK, and she was a Visiting Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education 2003-2018. For five decades she has been working on the development of young peoples’ moral, civic and political beliefs, identity and behavior.  She has also worked on cultural factors in science and society, including how young people regard science and technology and how this influences their choices of study and career.  Haste was director of the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Spencer Foundation-funded New Civics Early Career Scholars' Program. She is also the author or editor of six books and over 150 scholarly papers, and she was co-editor of the journal Political Psychology (2010-2015). Haste is a recipient of two of the International Society of Political Psychology's career awards, the Sanford Award and the Knutson Award, and the Association for Moral Education's Kuhmerker Award for her lifetime contribution to the field of moral development.

Angela Bermudez is a researcher at the Center for Applied Ethics in Deusto University, where she chairs the research group on Conflicts and Cultures of Peace. Her own research investigates the role of history education in fostering or hindering a critical understanding of political violence, and thus, how it may contribute to peace building.

She obtained her doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2008 where she investigated youth engagement in the discussion of social and political controversies. Prior to that, she worked in Colombia, where she was born and raised. For over a decade she worked in the field of democracy education, developing curriculum guidelines and teaching and assessment resources, training teachers, teaching youth, and doing research.

Throughout the years she has been a consultant to various institutions, including the national Ministry of Education of Colombia, the Secretary of Education of Bogotá, the Organization of American States (OAS), the Organization of Iberoamerican States (OEI), and the Colombian Institute for the Promotion of Higher Education (ICFES). She has taught, among others, at the University of Deusto (Bilbao), Northeastern University (Boston), Harvard University (Cambridge), Javeriana University (Bogotá) and the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO, Buenos Aires).

Boris Zizek is a Professor and Head of the Institute for Educational Science of the Leibniz University Hannover in Germany. He is a member of the Board of the Association for Moral Education (AME). He studies adolescent development from an international comparative perspective. His current research focuses on the challenges of growing up in diverse contexts. One focus is the exploration of digital social spaces and the mediated interactions between adolescents. Other focal points include the study of growing up in conflictual socialization spaces using the example of Israel and the study of adolescence in accelerated and compressed modernity using the example of South Korea and China. Dr. Zizek has summarized his constitution-theoretical modeling with the terms "probation-seeker" and "adolescents as philosophers and artists". Methodically, his research team works with reconstructive methods, in particular "objective hermeneutics".

Henderikus Stam is a Professor Emeritus and a former Adjunct Professor in the Department of History at the University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada. His recent work has focused on contemporary theoretical problems in psychology and the historical foundations of 20^th century psychology. He was the founding editor of  Theory & Psychology which he edited for 26 years.  He is a founding member and former President of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology; a former President of Division 24 of the American Psychological Association (Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology) as well as Division 26 (Society for the History of Psychology). In 2015 he was honored when the American Psychological Foundation presented him the Joseph Gittler award for his contributions to the philosophy of psychology.

Dr. Hoi Cheu (Co-Applicant) is a Full Professor in the Department of English Arts at Laurentian University. Trained in bibliotherapy and registered at the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) (1997-1999), Dr. Cheu was the past President of the Canadian Association for Bibliotherapy and Applied Literature. He has continued his clinical practice until his tenure appointment at Laurentian University, where he has focused on health research. He has merged complex systems theory with the use of literature to develop methods for mental health intervention. Since 2005, after the completion of his book Cinematic Howling (UBC Press, 2007), he has joined the Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research as a faculty investigator. He was the principal qualitative researcher in a mixed-method longitudinal tracking study (2005-2015) of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine.  He was also one of the program designers and children’s group facilitators of the Holistic Arts-Based Program for youth at risk. Currently, he is the Co-Applicant and core member in a project funded by two SSHRC grants at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, engaging arts-based methods and complex systems theory to study how to improve the social accountability of medical education.

Leiping Bao is a Professor of Social Policy and Children Development at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences(SASS), Shanghai, China. Her research focuses on the studies of children, women and family related issues and policies, publications involve books and thesis, such as “Only Children Myth”, “Deep Modernization: Youth’s Confliction and Value Identity”, “Family Stress in Transformation Society” etc. Dr. Bao also serves as the Vice Chairwoman of Shanghai Association of Family and Marriage Studies and the director of Gender Studies Research Center of SASS.

Minghui Gao earned a Doctor of Education degree from Harvard University. Dr. Gao is Professor of Education at Arkansas State University, USA. His research includes effective assessment, cross-cultural self-concept, human social-moral issues with a particular interest in lying and cyberbullying, among others. Dr. Gao teaches educational measurement, child and adolescent development, and research methods and design. Gao lives in Jonesboro, Arkansas with his wife Hongli and two daughters Maggie and Melissa.