Eve Ekman: Interview

Eve Ekman, Ph.D., MSW, is a GGSC Senior Fellow. An experienced speaker, researcher, and group facilitator, she brings a unique background ideally suited to training individuals and organizations in the science of happiness, resilience, compassion, mindfulness, and emotional awareness. Eve creates dynamic trainings adapted specifically for the needs of her participants, drawing upon her deep scientific knowledge, direct clinical work, and experiences in a range of institutional and organizational settings, particularly within the health care field. She worked for years as a social worker in health care, criminal justice, and social welfare systems, which inspired her to earn her master’s and Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and complete her postdoctoral training at UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine. Her research has focused on helping professional care providers prevent burnout by giving them easier access to practices of attention, insight, and resilience. Building on her research, she developed trainings to address burnout in national and international organizations and has delivered keynotes and workshops for a wide range of companies, including Airbnb, Salesforce, and Kaiser Permanente. Eve is a second-generation emotion researcher who has had meaningful collaborations with her father, renowned emotion researcher Dr. Paul Ekman, including on The Atlas of Emotions, an online visual tool commissioned by the Dalai Lama to teach emotional awareness, and Cultivating Emotional Balance, an intensive, evidence-based training for compassion and mindfulness. Eve’s writing on empathy, burnout, and compassion has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, magazines, and books, including Oxford handbooks of positive psychology and compassion science. She is a regular practitioner of meditation, yoga, and cold water surfing, and brings her enthusiasm for living a rich emotional life into her teaching.https://eveekman.com/