Kennon Sheldon is a Curator’s Professor of Psychology at the University of Missouri. He has long been active in Positive Psychology, having attended the foundational Akumal conferences and having won a Templeton Prize in 2002 for his early contributions to the field. He studies goals, motivation, and well-being, and is best known for his work in Self-determination theory, his self-concordance model of optimal goal striving, and his happiness research with Sonja Lyubomirsky. He is the author of the books Optimal Human Being: An Integrated Multilevel Perspective (Erlbaum, 2003), Self-determination theory in the clinic: Motivating Physical and Mental Health (Yale University Press, 200 and Freely Determined: What the New Psychology of the Self teaches us about how to Live (Basic Books, 2022), among others. He has also published more than 300 research articles, with a Google Scholar H of more than 100.