James M. Lang is a Professor of English and the Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. He is the author of six books, the most recent of which are Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, and On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching.

Writer Emily Esfahani Smith draws on psychology, philosophy and literature to write about the human experience—why we are the way we are and how we can find grace and meaning in a world that is full of suffering.

Vinton Cerf is considered by many as the father of the Internet. He was the founding president of the Internet Society. With the Internet, Vinton Cerf completely revolutionized information transmission processes, allowing the unrestricted flow of information around the world.

BBVA USA frequently leads the banking industry in digital transformation, rolling out award-winning products, and collaborating with fintechs and tech giants to bring a new, convenient age of banking to its clients.

Kai-Fu Lee is a Taiwanese-born American businessman and writer, regarded as one of the world’s top AI experts.  He graduated from Columbia University in computer science, and earned a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, where, as part of his thesis, he completed what is considered the first independent speech recognition system: Sphinx.

BBVA USA might don a logo steep in shades of blue, but make no mistake, over the past few years, the bank has turned its attention to a very green topic.

Siri Hustvedt has published works of fiction, essays, poetry and academic articles. Her work is underpinned by feminism, art, and science.

While the pandemic created by the novel COVID-19 develops and sends Americans down an unprecedented path, fraudsters are jumping at the chance to capitalize on that uncertainty.

The future will never look the same. If one were to scour news articles and studies around the current health situation, one will find that a good portion of medical experts will convey this concept. It’s difficult to say what the future will look like in multiple facets of society, but it’s safe to say that the ripple effects will be prominent, at least in the beginning.

Tali Sharot is the director of the Affective Brain Lab. She is a professor of cognitive neuroscience in the Experimental Psychology department at University College London and a senior research fellow at the Wellcome Trust.

Susan Cain is a U.S writer and author of the best seller, ‘Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.’ Her work revolutionized our concept about personality, that argues that modern, Western culture misinterprets and undervalues the skills and traits of introverts.

Lisa Damour is an american psychologist and writer specializing in the development of adolescent and young women. Her first New York Times best seller, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood focuses on the seven distinct developmental stages that girls go through as they grow into adults.

Sonja Lyubomirsky received her PhD in social psychology from Stanford University and is currently Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside.

Noam Chomsky is one of the frequently cited intellectuals in history. Considered the founder of modern linguistics, he has written numerous essays that made their way around the world. In the field of linguistics, he introduced the ‘Chomsky hierarchy’, generative grammar and the ‘universal grammar’ theory.

Matthieu grew up surrounded by ideas and figures from French intellectual circles. He first time traveling was to India in 1967. He obtained a PhD in Molecular Biology at the Instituto Pasteur under the sponsorship of Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine François Jacob.

This week, the BBVA Mind Bank podcast features a special one-off interview between two people who firmly believe artificial intelligence has the potential to change the world for the better.

Marine biologist, environmental activist and ‘slow travel’ advocate, the British sustainability guru maintains that the most urgent aspect of the climate crisis is questioning the mechanisms of progress — and identifying all of its traps.

Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to register for a marathon. During the race they tried to forcibly remove her number – a scene that became immortalized, and the photograph of the moment made its way around the world. Afterwards, the number she wore – 261 – has become a symbol of gender equality in sports.

Digital, in a lot of cases of innovation, means convenience and mobility.

Convinced that “copy paste” is the foundation of art, writer and artist Austin Kleon has turned his thesis into a way of life. He defines himself as “a writer who draws”. His first best seller  “Newspaper Blackout” is a book of poetry, which he created by re-editing newspaper articles with a permanent marker. “They look like haikus made by the CIA,” Kleon jokes.

What is stoicism and how can it help us manage a life crisis? A doctor and professor of philosophy, Massimo Pigliucci faced a critical juncture with the death of his father and undergoing a divorce. He looked to the ancient philosophers for answers and discovered “virtue ethics,” an approach to life that advances human improvement through the development of values.

Alex Beard has spent a decade dedicated to educational research. He is a member of Teach for All, a worldwide network of independent educational organizations that seek to ensure that all children are given the opportunity to fulfil their potential. He has traveled the world studying the most innovative, ground-breaking educational methods. Of everything he has learned on his travels, he stresses that we should “take creativity more seriously” and that we are at the threshold of an “educational revolution”.

We live in a “tyranny of positivity” say U.S. psychologist Susan David: “Society demands that the ill remain optimistic, that women don’t show outrage, and that men don’t cry,” she says. According to her research, most people judge themselves for feeling “negative” emotions like anger, disappointment or sadness. But “repressing or denying these emotions makes them stronger and lead us to deadlock,” she maintains.

250 students were expected to register for Yale University Professor Laurie Santos’ class “Psychology and the Good Life”. Instead it became a mass phenomenon with 1,200 registered students. She later offered her class “The Science of Well-Being” online, and it went viral around the world. Why? Because human beings have spent thousands of years searching for happiness, to no avail.

Why do we fall in love? The neurobiologist and anthropologist, Helen Fisher, began studying love scientifically using brain scans in her research on 49 men and women. Some of the group were madly in love, while others had been rejected. Shortly thereafter, individuals who continued to be in love after three decades of marriage were included in the sample of research subjects.

Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist and string theory expert, is one of the most well known scientific commentators in the world. He received his doctorate from the University of California in 1972, and for three decades has held the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York.

“What if I told you there was something that you can do right now that would have an immediate, positive benefit for your brain including your mood and your focus? Would you do it?” With this starting point, Wendy Suzuki, Psychology Professor and Neuroscientist at the New York University’s Center for Neural Science, has spent years inspiring a sedentary society with problems with excess weight, stress and anxiety.

Mary Gordon is an educator and the founder of ‘Roots of Empathy’ and ‘Seeds of Empathy’, two revolutionary educational programs based on the development of empathy and in nurturing emotional literacy from early childhood. According to Mary Gordon, “many of the problems afflicting society, like violence and poverty, are rooted in a lack of empathy.”