Humanities and Human Flourishing Project newsletter aims to advance the understanding, assessment, and cultivation of well-being by means of a deep and sustained collaboration between the arts, humanities, and the social sciences.
Melissa Forbes
Melissa Forbes is Associate Professor of Contemporary Singing at the University of Southern Queensland and a leading advocate for the transformative power of music, particularly singing. Her music career spans performance, higher music education, research, and community engagement. Melissa’s work bridges research with practical community music leadership, demonstrating music's role in supporting social health.
Alex Rodriguez
As an interdisciplinary researcher and artist, Alex Rodriguez, PhD, MPH, mobilizes evidence about the preventative and rehabilitative impacts of arts engagement for mental health into practices and policies that will create equitable infrastructure for communities to thrive.
Kalie Smith
Kaile Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in Cognitive Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she studies inspiration, creativity, and psychological well-being. Her research examines how creative engagement unfolds in everyday life and how processes such as inspiration, emotion, and meaning shape creative behavior and flourishing, using ecological assessment, experimental, psychometric, and computational methods.
Jeremy Nobel (UPenn Med '81)
Jeremy Nobel (UPenn Med '81), MD, MPH is a longtime faculty member of the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where his teaching and research activities include addressing loneliness, isolation, and social disconnection as both personal and public health concerns. Dr. Nobel is the author of Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection and the founder and president of The Foundation for Art & Healing, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that champions creative expression as a path to improved health and well-being for individuals and communities.
Clair Morrissey
Clair Morrissey is Professor of Philosophy and Director for Partnerships with Los Angeles at Occidental College. She is an award-winning teacher whose interdisciplinary and cross-divisional work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Bringing Theory to Practice, and the National Institutes of Health. Morrissey specializes in moral philosophy, including the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. She is author of The Virtue of Wit: Humor, Social Connection and Flourishing (2025).
Sasha Sherman
Sasha Sherman is Professor and Chair of Cognitive Science at Occidental College. She is an award-winning research mentor and has published across the sciences, humanities, and arts. Sherman's research program is expressly interdisciplinary and explores the intersection of empirical aesthetics, the arts, and multisensory perception. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Science Foundation.