Work with thought leaders and academic experts in Teamwork

Orin Davis earned the first doctorate in positive psychology, and is a self-actualization engineer who enables people to do and be their best. He consults for companies from startups to multinationals on hiring strategies, culture, innovation, diversity/equity/inclusion, and employee well-being, and coaches people at all levels on building self-knowledge and developing personal and professional growth trajectories. As the principal investigator of the Quality of Life Laboratory, he conducts research on flow, creativity, hypnosis, and mentoring. Dr. Davis teaches business at Columbia University and Fordham University, and gives workshops and lectures globally about human capital, creativity and innovation, and positive psychology. He is a startup advisor who helps early-stage companies enhance their value propositions, pitches, culture, and human capital, and writes and speaks avidly about human capital, creativity and innovation, and positive psychology.

Tom is a global research leader in the areas of high-performance teamwork, virtual team and leader effectiveness, flexible remote and hybrid work, human-autonomy teaming, conflict and conflict management, personality, and assessment. His research funding exceeds $6M and he currently leads a lab team of 15, which includes doctoral, post-doctoral, and masters candidates, as well as undergraduate students and staff members. Tom has published over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles in outlets such as Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Organizational Research Methods, Computers in Human Behavior, and Human Resource Management Review, and he has worked extensively to translate the science of high-performance teamwork and flexible remote work into practice through consultations, workshops, public lectures, training, software development, and other services.

Madlen Simon AIA is an experienced architect, researcher, educator, and scholar in the area of design - design thinking, design education, design of buildings, and the application of design to issues such as sustainability and community health. Professor Simon graduated from Princeton University with Bachelors and Masters degrees in Architecture. Professor Simon began her academic career in 1991, after 14 years practicing architecture in two world-renowned architecture firms, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Edward Larrabee Barnes Associates, as well as leading her own firm, Simon Design. Simon's broad experience in design practice ranges in scale from corporate campus master planning to product design, with a particular focus on residential architecture. At the University of Maryland, she is Professor in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Professor Simon’s research and teaching centers on design thinking, the iterative process of integrating human experience into problem solving and finding innovative approaches to support how people use and interact with their environment. She has led dozens of community-based master planning and design projects funded by communities and non-profit organizations, and undertaken with graduate students and faculty colleagues, bridge between teaching, research, and practice, including “A New Vision for Midtown” for the College Park City-University Partnership and “Glen Echo Park Master Plan” for the Glen Echo Park Partnership for Arts and Culture. She was co-Principal Investigator on WaterShed, the University of Maryland's first prize-winning entry into the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon 2011. In 2015, Simon established ARCH601 *Topical Studio: Bridging the Gap*, a Global Classrooms Initiative course in collaboration with Al-Nahrain University in Baghdad, which was awarded *Architect Magazine’s* Studio Prize in 2019. Her recent research, in collaboration with Assistant Professor Ming Hu, combines an immersive virtual environment (VR) and electroencephalogram (EEG) as a promising tool to evaluate alternative options during the early design stage of a project. This work is funded by an AIA Upjohn Research Initiative Grant.

Leadership development, communication, innovative problem solving, writing, career counseling, mentoring, community engagement,.