Ryan Meachen is an Associate Research Fellow at the Leadership & Happiness Laboratory at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership.

He is a visiting Fulbright Scholar from New Zealand, where he is currently a PhD student in Organizational Behavior at Victoria University of Wellington. Ryan has an MBA from Victoria Wellington School of Business and Government, as well as a B.Sc. in Geography and Public Policy.

After graduating with his MBA, Ryan spent 3 years working as a Senior Consultant at Continuum Consulting Group in Wellington. His work primarily focuses on leadership development, professional coaching, and organizational well-being. Ryan is a certified positive psychology coach, trained under the tutelage of Robert Biswas-Diener and Christian van Nieuwerburgh.

Ryan’s PhD research focuses on how individuals fulfil their potential by actualizing their ideal selves, and the factors in organizational environments which either hinder or enable ‘ideal-self-actualization’. More broadly his teaching and research interests focus on the psychology of human potential, happiness, and leadership.