Speaker: Dr. Hunter Gehlbach, Professor and Co-Director of Education for the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health 

Dr. Hunter Gehlbach identifies psychological principles to facilitate environmental storytelling—especially principles that motivate the audience to prioritize the planet’s health. For example, currently his research group is testing the impact of establishing common ground when discussing controversial climate topics. Only by building more effective narrative approaches to climate education can we develop the relationships, will, and collective solutions that our children are depending on.   

An educational psychologist by training and a social psychologist at heart, his other research interests include improving the social side of schooling (e.g., experiments to improve teacher-student relationships) and sharpening social science methodology to reduce error and improve reproducibility of results (e.g., by improving questionnaire design processes or boosting researcher transparency by leveraging more open science practices). 

He is an American Educational Research Association Fellow, an American Psychological Association Fellow of Division 15, as well as a former high school teacher and coach. Gehlbach was on faculty at Harvard (2006-2015) and UCSB (2015-2019) and has been at the Johns Hopkins School of Education ever since.