Lisa Honig Buksbaum, MBA, MAPP; CEO & Founder, Soaringwords
Lisa HonigBuksbaumis a passionary: a visionary driven by great passion and action. She is an intuitive healer and well-loved inspirational speaker, workshop leader and master teacher who has shared her wisdom with thousands of people throughout the world. Three experiences with death and illness in her family during a ten-month period motivated her to launch Soaringwords, a not-for-profit organization she founded to inspire millions of ill children and their families to “Never give up!” Since 2001, Lisa has shared her SOARING into Strength success strategies with over 500,000 people through Soaringwords. She’s been featured as an expert on ABC News, Fortune Small Business, USA Today, and Delta Sky Magazine.

Lisa has been a keynote speaker, moderator, and panelist at dozens of professional and scientific conferences including the International Positive Psychology Association, European Positive Psychology Conference and International Positive Education Network.  Lisa has led workshops at Universities, Medical Schools and Nursing Schools including University of Pennsylvania, UVA School of Medicine & School of Nursing, Tecmilienio University, NYU, and Columbia, She has led professional development workshops at dozens of Fortune 50 companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Facebook, Google, JPMorgan Chase, New York Life, and Verizon. Lisa graduated with honors from The University of Pennsylvania; holds an MBA in Marketing from Columbia University Graduate School of Business; and a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology from The University of Pennsylvania. She has a certificate in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and a certificate from the American Institute for Mental Imagery. She is the author of SOARING into Strength that will be published in 2019.  Lisa lives in New York City with her husband, Jacob, and has two grown sons, Jonathan and Joshua and gets her energy from swimming each day and connecting with people in meaningful ways.

Greta Rozensweig, Community Relations Manager
Greta joined Soaringwords as an intern, working 20 hours per week, during her senior year of college. In 2002, upon her graduation, Greta became the first full time employee. She coordinates corporate community outreach programs, which includes companies such as New York Life Insurance, Accenture and Johnson & Johnson. She also manages nationwide educational outreach initiatives for at-risk school students and hospitalized children. Greta manages Soaringwords + Zumba initiative coordinating with Child Life professionals in hospitals and hundreds of Zumba instructors who lead classes for hospitalized children, their families and nurses. Greta holds a BA in Psychology from Brooklyn College.

Dr. Margaret (Peggy) L. Kern, Director of Research
Dr. Kern is senior lecturer, Positive Psychology Center, University of Melbourne, Graduate School of Education, Australia. Her research incorporates a lifespan perspective, statistical methods, and interdisciplinary collaboration to investigate individual and social factors that lead to and alter individual trajectories toward health, well-being, and resilience. She examines how to define health, psychological well-being, and individual differences; how to best measure these constructs at individual and societal levels; the relation between physical, psychological, social, and operational function at different ages across the lifespan; and the mechanisms and moderators involved in observed relations. She is currently guiding the measure construction, study design, and data analysis components for several large-scale studies that aim to define and measure positive health and well-being. Most recently, Peggy has developed two brief multidimensional measure of adolescent and adult flourishing: the EPOCH Measure of Adolescent Well-being and the PERMA-Profiler. A summa cum laude graduate from Arizona State University, Peggy received her doctorate in psychology in June 2010 from the University of California, Riverside.

Becky Lindsay, Project Artisan and Coordinator
Becky uses her significant talents to pull together the 101 details required to make an expressive arts project in a hospital work. From creating prototypes and assembling “program in a box” packages for our hospital partners, Becky knows how to get things done. She’s a talented artisan in fabric, quilting, and other media. She has 30 years experience in education as the Administrator in the Administrative and Behavioral Studies department for the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.