Changing the Odds

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris is an award-winning physician, researcher and public health leader who has spent her career on the front lines of some of our world’s most pressing public health challenges. She served as California’s first-ever Surgeon General and is the founder of Center for Youth Wellness, to advance pediatric medicine, raise public awareness, and transform the way society responds to children exposed to ACEs and toxic stress. She is the author of The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity, and her TED Talk, “How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across the Lifetime” has been viewed more than 10 million times.

Dr. Adam Sáenz earned his Ph.D. in School Psychology from Texas A&M University as a United States Department of Education doctoral fellow. He currently serves as the C.E.O. of the Applied EQ Group, the counseling and assessment clinic he founded in 2003. He also serves as a consulting psychologist in the Texas A&M College of Medicine and the Texas A&M Department of Athletics, and he leads professional development courses in public schools throughout the United States. Dr. Sáenz has authored multiple titles, including the best-selling, The Power of a Teacher and Relationships That Work. His most recent release, The EQ Intervention, was an Amazon best-seller that won the Independent Publisher Association gold medal in psychology.

Nedra Glover Tawwab is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Drama Free and Set Boundaries, Find Peace. A licensed therapist and sought-after relationship expert, she has practiced relationship therapy for more than fifteen years. Every day she helps people create healthy relationships by teaching them how to implement boundaries. Her philosophy is that a lack of boundaries and assertiveness underlie most relationship issues, and her gift is helping people create healthy relationships with themselves and others. Tawwab runs a popular Instagram account where she shares practices, tools, and reflections for mental health and relationships.

Dr. Wendy Suzuki is a world-renowned neuroscientist and a celebrated international authority on neuroplasticity. Dr. Suzuki is best known for her research examining how the brain forms long-term memories, while her more recent work has focused on how aerobic exercise can be used to improve learning, memory, and higher cognitive abilities in humans. Dr. Suzuki’s Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion is a guidebook for how to harness the power of anxiety into unexpected gifts. Her previous book, Healthy Brain, Happy Life: A Personal Program to Activate Your Brain and Do Everything Better, explores the biological connection between exercise, mindfulness, and action. In this fascinating book, Dr. Suzuki accessibly teaches readers how they can make their body feel alive while activating their brains. Her infamous TED talk on the brain-changing benefits of exercise has received more than 31 million views on Facebook and was the 2nd most viewed TED talk of 2018. In her keynotes and presentations, Dr. Suzuki energizes audiences with her dynamic speaking and physical exercises. She implores crowds to get off their feet, engage both their mind and body, and transform their ways of thinking and living.

Dr. Leslie Korn is a Harvard Medical School-trained traumatologist specializing in mental health nutrition and integrative approaches to treating mind and body. Her work centers on the intersection of trauma, cognition, and chronic physical illness. She began her training over 45 years ago in the jungle of Mexico and completed it in the “jungle” at Harvard Medical school in the departments of psychiatry and public health. She is the founding director of the Center for Traditional Medicine, and director of research and education at the Center for World Indigenous Studies, a nonprofit advancing the rights of indigenous peoples worldwide. She has authored 10 books including Nutrition Essentials for Mental Health and The Brainbow Blueprint: A Clinical Guide to Integrative Medicine and Nutrition for Mental Well-Being.