Professor John F. Helliwell, of the Vancouver School of Economics at UBC, long-time Research Associate of the NBER, is Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and Co-Director of CIFAR’s program on ‘Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being’. Recent books include Well-Being for Public Policy (OUP, with Diener, Lucas and Schimmack, 2009), International Differences in Well-Being (OUP, edited with Diener and Kahneman, 2010), and five editions, 2012-2017, of the World Happiness Report (edited with Richard Layard and Jeffrey Sachs).

He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Officer of the Order of Canada.

For more detail see: http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/jhelliwell/

Professor Lord Richard Layard is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where he was until 2003 the founder-director of the Centre for Economic Performance. He now heads the Centre’s Programme on Well-Being. Since 2000 he has been a member of the House of Lords and is a keen advocate of making subjective well-being of the people the central objective of governments.

He is a labour economist who has made major contributions on unemployment, inflation, inequality and post-Communist reform. He was an early advocate of the welfare-to-work approach to European unemployment and his work has influenced policy in many countries. In 2008, he was awarded the IZA Prize in Labour Economics.

His influential book Happiness – Lessons from a New Science was published in 2005 and has sold 150,000 copies in 20 languages. A second edition was published in 2011. He also advises the British Government on mental health policy and is an architect of the new revolutionary policy of Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT). His latest book, co-authored with David Clark, Thrive: The power of evidence-based psychological therapies, was published in 2014.

He has also persuaded the OECD and its member countries to measure the happiness of their people, been an adviser to the UK Office of National Statistics, and he co-edits the bi-annual World Happiness Report (which gets over one million downloads a year). His aim is to persuade governments to choose policies which maximise the happiness of their people, and his current research provides them with the quantitative tools and methods to do this.

Professor Richard Wilkinson studied economic history and the philosophy of science at the London School of Economics before training in epidemiology.  From the 1970s onwards, his research focused on increasing public awareness of the injustice of widening social class differences in death rates.  He has played a formative role in international research on the social determinants of health and on the societal effects of income inequality.  His books and papers have drawn attention to the tendency for societies with bigger income differences between rich and poor to have a higher prevalence of a wide range of health and social problems.  Two of his books have been the subject of documentary films – one called The Great Leveller for the Channel 4 Equinox series broadcast in prime time in 1996 (to coincide with the publication of his Unhealthy Societies) and another, called The Divide (based on The Spirit Level) released in April 2016 and now available on Netflix.

Richard is now Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School, Honorary Professor at University College London and Visiting Professor at the University of York.  He wrote The Spirit Level with Kate Pickett, a best seller now available in 24 languages.  It won the 2011 Political Studies Association Publication of the Year Award and the 2010 Bristol Festival of Ideas Prize. He co-founded The Equality Trust (with support from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust).  In 2013 Richard received Solidar’s Silver Rose Award and received Community Access Unlimited’s ‘Humanitarian of the Year’ Award.  In 2014 the Irish Cancer Society awarded him the Charles Cully Memorial medal.

In the last few years he has given many hundreds of conference addresses and media interviews round the world, including at WHO, the EU, OECD and the World Bank.

Antonella Delle Fave works as professor of Psychology at the Medical School of the University of Milano, Italy. After getting an MD degree, she specialized in clinical psychology and devoted her research activities to the investigation of well-being indicators, with a particular attention to cultural and diversity issues.

She developed research and intervention projects in the domains of health and education, and supervised international co-operation programs to promote resource implementation in conditions of disability and social maladjustment. Together with international partners she launched and implemented the “Eudaimonic and Hedonic Happiness Investigation”, aimed at identifying well-being components across cultures. She is currently conducting research and intervention projects on well-being promotion in conditions of chronic and degenerative diseases among patients and caregivers, exploring the potential of an integrated treatment approach.

Her scientific production includes papers in peer-reviewed journals, as well as authored and edited books. The most recent ones are Psychological selection and optimal experience across countries (Springer, co-authored with F.Massimini and M.Bassi, 2011), Well-being and Cultures: Perspectives from Positive Psychology (Springer, edited with H.H.Knoop, 2012), The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of the Psychology of Positivity and Strengths-Based Approaches at Work (edited with L.Oades, M. Steger and J.Passmore, 2017) and Flow at work: Measurement and implications (Taylor & Francis, edited with C.Fullagar, 2017). She contributed as field editor and author to The Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research (edited by A.C.Michalos, 2014). She served as President of the International Positive Psychology Association (2009-2011) and of the European Network of Positive Psychology (2006-2010).  Since 2010 she is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Happiness Studies.