2016 Keynote Speaker

Dr. Shane Lopez

Friday, April 22, at 10 a.m. in the K-State Alumni Center

Dr. Lopez, author of Making Hope Happen , is the world's leading researcher on hope. His mission is to teach people that investing in their future pays off today. Dr. Lopez is also one of the most vocal advocates of the psychological reform of America's education system. He helps schools function less like impersonal factories and more like dynamic human development centers that enable students to achieve the meaningful futures they say they really want, including a good job and a happy family.

Dr. Lopez is a Gallup Senior Scientist and Research Director of the Clifton Strengths Institute. He is chief architect of the Gallup Student Poll, a measure of hope, engagement, and wellbeing that taps into the hearts and minds of U.S. public school students to determine what drives achievement. It is available at no cost to public schools or districts interested in using it to start a hope conversation in their community. More than 1 million students have participated since its inception.

Dr. Lopez researches the links between hope, strengths development, academic success, and overall wellbeing and collaborates with scholars around the world on these issues. He specializes in hope and strengths enhancement for students from preschool through college graduation, advocating a whole-school strengths model that also builds the strengths expertise of educators, parents, and youth development organizations. He is coauthor of the statistical reports for the Clifton StrengthsFinder and the Clifton Youth StrengthsExplorer.

A prolific author, Dr. Lopez has published more than 100 articles and chapters and 10 books. These include Positive Psychology: The Scientific and Practical Explorations of Human Strengths, winner of the SAGE Press Book of the Year Award (with C.R. Snyder and Jennifer Teramoto Pedrotti); The Handbook of Positive Psychology (with C.R. Snyder); Positive Psychological Assessment: A Handbook of Models and Measures (with C.R. Snyder); Positive Psychology: Exploring the Best in People; The Encyclopedia of Positive Psychology; and The Psychology of Courage: Modern Research on an Ancient Virtue (with Cynthia Pury).

Dr. Lopez is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. A professor of education for a decade, he is now professor of business at the University of Kansas.