Keynote Speakers

Michele Gelfand is the John H. Scully Professor of Cross-Cultural Management and Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Professor of Psychology by Courtesy. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences. Her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World was published by Scribner in 2018. She is the Past President of the International Association for Conflict Management. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nathan Nunn is a Professor of Economics at the University of British Columbia and holds a Canada Research Chair in cultural economics. His research examines the historical and dynamic process of economic development, focusing on the evolution of culture, norms, and institutions across societies. He has published dozens of articles aimed at improving our understanding of the historical process of factors relevant to economic development, including distrust, gender norms, religiosity, rule-following, zero-sum thinking, honor cultures, conflict, immigration, state formation, and support for democracy. Another aspect of his research examines the importance of local cultural context for contemporary development policy.

Sandra Matz is the David W. Zalaznick Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and the author of Mindmasters. As a computational social scientist, she studies human behavior using a combination of Big Data analytics and experimental methods. Her research explores how psychological characteristics influence real-life outcomes in different business-related domains (e.g. financial well-being, consumer satisfaction or team performance), with the goal of helping businesses and individuals make better and more ethical decisions.

The research of Dr. Matz has been published in the world’s leading scientific journals and is frequently covered by major news outlets around the world. She has won numerous awards, including Data IQ’s most influential people in data-driven marketing, Pacific Standard’s 30 top thinkers under 30, and Poets and Quants 40 under 40 best business school professors.

Dr. Igor Grossmann is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, whose research focuses on the complexities of human judgment, wisdom, and cultural dynamics. Grossmann’s current work explores whether a unique quality distinguishes human excellence beyond intelligence and personality, focusing on how wisdom manifests across diverse cultural and socio-ecological contexts, what features of wisdom transfer across generations and societies, and what wisdom is needed to handle conflicting narratives, heuristics and analytical strategies in daily life. Integrating insights from psychology, anthropology, economics, and cognitive science, Dr. Grossmann has developed advanced econometric and computational models and methods for tracking and evaluating societal change, offering nuanced understandings of cultural differences across levels of analysis. As the founder of international initiatives like the Wise Judgment Consortium and the Forecasting Collaborative, Grossmann lead transdisciplinary teams in redefining decision-making beyond Western-centric models. His contributions have advanced the understanding of how cultures dynamically shape cognition, emotion, values, and practices, illuminating the societal and ecological forces driving cultural psychological change.

Markus Jokela is a psychology professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His research has focused on personality, intelligence, mental health, and on the associations between individual differences and population processes, including fertility, migration, and mortality. Much of his research is based on individual-participant meta-analysis of multiple longitudinal cohort studies. In geographical psychology, he has been particularly interested in the psychological factors predicting residential mobility. He holds a PhD in psychology from University of Helsinki, and a PhD in epidemiology and public health from University College London.