Laura Menabo is a developmental psychologist specializing in bullying and peer relationships. She obtained a joint Ph.D. from the University of Bologna (Italy) and Flinders University (South Australia). She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Norwegian Centre for Learning Environment and Behavioural Research in Education at the University of Stavanger (Norway).

Her research focuses on how individuals perceive and interpret bullying situations, with particular attention to visual attention and cognitive processing. Using innovative methodologies such as eye-tracking, she investigates how adolescents and adults observe bullying interactions and recognize the roles involved (e.g., bully, victim, bystander, defender). Her work also integrates questionnaires, focus groups, and the analysis of students' drawings to better understand bystander behavior and inform prevention strategies in schools. She has authored several peer-reviewed publications on bullying and cyberbullying.

Carol D. Ryff is Director of the Institute on Aging and Hilldale Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Ryff is Principal Investigator of the MIDUS (Midlife in the U.S.) national longitudinal study, which is widely used by researchers around the world. She also directed MIDJA (Midlife in Japan), for which she received an NIH Merit Award. A major objective of these studies is biopsychosocial integration — i.e., understanding pathways to health or illness via linkage of sociodemographic factors (age, gender, race, socioeconomic status) with behavioral, psychological, and social factors, including stress exposures and contextual influences. Her own research focused on a model of psychological well-being she developed decades ago, which has been translated to 40 languages and is used across diverse scientific fields.

Dr. Ryff has studied how psychological well-being varies by age, educational status and cultural context as well as by the challenges and transitions of adult life. Whether well-being is protective of good physical health is a major interest, with numerous findings linking different aspects of well-being to morbidity and mortality, diverse biomarkers (neuroendocrine, immune, cardiovascular) and neural circuitry. A guiding theme is resilience — how some are able to maintain, or regain, well-being in the face of adversity and what neurobiology underlies this capacity.

Increasingly, she is interested in how major historical events, such as the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, are undermining the well-being and health of socioeconomically disadvantaged segments of society. Of major concern are recent findings from MIDUS documenting persistent disadvantage (over 20 years) in well-being among those lacking opportunities for higher education. Widening inequality and its impact on health and well-being is a contemporary imperative for science and practice.