Dacher Keltner’s research focuses the biological and evolutionary origins of compassion, awe, love, and beauty, and power, social class, and inequality. As a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab he is one of the leading scholars studying the psychology of awe and with a recent grant from the John Templeton Foundation he is conducting research examining how awe is experienced across the globe. Dacher also serves as the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Greater Good Science Center.

Dacher is the author of the best-selling Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, and The Compassionate Instinct. He has published over 160 scientific ar ticles, including seminal works on the psychology of awe (Keltner & Haidt, 2003) and is the coauthor of two best-selling textbooks, one on human emotion, the other on social psychology. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, London Times, and Utne Reader, and his research has been covered in Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, CNN, NPR, and the BBC as well as many other outlets.

Dacher has collaborated with directors at Pixar, the design team at Facebook, and on projects at Google. He is featured in Tom Shadyac’s documentary I Am. He has twice presented his research to His Holiness the Dalai Lama as part of a continuing dialogue

between the Dalai Lama and scientists. Dacher has received outstanding teacher and research mentor awards from UC Berkeley, and seen 20 of his PhD students and post-doctoral fellows become professors.

Dacher is an outstanding speaker who has received several national research and teach­ing awards. Wired magazine has rated the podcasts of his “Human Emotion” course as one of the five best academic podcasts in the country. The Utne Reader named Dacher as one of its 50 Visionaries of 2008.