The 2025 Nova Annual Conference, “Cultivating Connections: A Path to Transformation,” brings together visionary thinkers across disciplines to explore a strategies toward a connected consciousness. Through sessions focused on fostering belonging and collective resilience as well as a deeper exploration of a truly connected future, this event aimed to offer hopeful paths forward.
Each session features a panel of speakers, with opportunities for all attendees to interact and participate in the discussions.
Dec. 11, 10 am – 12 pm EST
Charles Eisenstein is a public speaker, counter-cultural intellectual, and the author of several books including The Ascent of Humanity, Sacred Economics, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, and Climate: A New Story. His online writings have generated a vast following; he speaks frequently at conferences and other events, and gives numerous interviews on radio and podcasts. According to Eisenstein, global culture is immersed in a destructive “story of separation”, and one of the main goals of his work is to present an alternative “story of interbeing.” Eisenstein graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a degree in mathematics and philosophy, and spent the next ten years as a Chinese-English translator.
Moitreyee Sinha is the chief executive officer and founder of citiesRISE. Originally from India, she has been guided by the core belief that everything is connected and that large-scale social transformation happens when people, communities, and institutions work together. She spent ten years in research and development at General Electric (GE) before transitioning to lead GE Foundation’s Global Health portfolio in 22 countries, forging connections across cultures and sectors to build multi-stakeholder initiatives in maternal child health and technology for health. With citiesRISE, Moitreyee brings her unique vision for collective, community-based action to the issue of mental health, breaking down barriers and unifying people, communities, and institutions in the service of helping others. She holds a PhD in physics and has received Cambodia’s highest Medal of Honor for Philanthropy, the Global Business Coalition’s Award for Disease Prevention & Beyond, and GE’s Highest Technical Team Award. Moitreyee enjoys arts, music, and nature, and meeting people from different cultures.
Byron Johnson is a distinguished professor of the social sciences at Baylor University. He is the founding director of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR) as well as director of the Institute for Global Human Flourishing. He is a leading authority on the scientific study of religion, the efficacy of faith-based organizations, and criminal justice. Along with Tyler VanderWeele, he is co-project director for the Global Flourishing Study. He has been the principal investigator on grants from private foundations as well as the Department of Justice, Department of Labor, Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, and the United States Institute for Peace. He is the author of more than 350 articles and a number of books including More God, Less Crime (2011), The Angola Prison Seminary (2016), The Quest for Purpose (2017), The Restorative Prison (2021), Objective Religion (2024), The Faith Factor and Social Welfare (2025), and the Death of Religion? (2026).
Gábor Soós is Secretary-General of the Hungarian National Commission for UNESCO, dedicated to bridging academia, diplomacy, and cultural heritage with insight and compassion. Holding a PhD in English literature and a D.E.A. in philosophy, he has long navigated the meeting points of thought and practice—working to build bridges between ideas, peoples, and traditions. A former diplomat at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris and visiting faculty at Central European University, he has contributed to shaping key international conventions and Hungary’s World Heritage framework. His integrative concept, TOLMA – Topo-Logos-Materia, reflects his vision for a more ethical, participatory, and place-based intelligence—one that honors wisdom traditions and invites a more connected and humane future.
AZA Allsop is an artist, neuroscientist, and psychiatrist who researches social cognition, music mindfulness, and psychedelics. His artistic, research, and clinical work is guided by the belief that decoding these tools will provide insights into how social groups function, treating mental suffering, and enhancing the evolution of society at large. AZA studied biology, jazz, and philosophy at North Carolina Central University, received his graduate training from the Harvard-MIT MD PhD program, and was an Emerson scholar at Berklee College of Music. He completed clinical training in psychiatry at Yale with a certification in psychedelic assisted therapy and research. He is currently an assistant professor at Yale and Howard University and director of the Center for Collective Healing. He is also medical director of the REST Crisis Center. Dr. AZA has co-founded several companies that combine arts, science, spirituality, and community building to drive social change and facilitate the healing process.
Andrew Bovarnick is the founder and team lead of the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA), hosted by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). He is the UNDP Global Head of Food and Agricultural Commodity Systems practice. With degrees from Oxford University and the Fletcher School of International Relations, he is at the cutting edge of thinking on transforming food and agricultural commodity systems and nature based solutions. He has more than 25 years’ expertise in changing systems through collaborative action and fostering transformative stakeholder partnerships and cooperation in food and commodity systems to address climate, conservation, and poverty. Andrew envisioned CoFSA to create a space where the international development community could cultivate and integrate inner change into daily work and ultimately catalyze elusive system transformation with food systems being the entry point.
Christina Bethell is a Nova Scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and School of Medicine where she advances a new science of thriving to promote the early and lifelong health of children and families. Dr. Bethell is also the founding director of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative which has developed and advanced an array of standardized child and family health and system performance measures. Her research focuses on building and translating the science of healthy development and the development and application of family centered data and tools to inform and drive positive systems improvements. She has been featured on National Public Radio, provided testimony to the U.S. Congress, and contributed to national efforts promoting relational health as the cornerstone of well-being for children, families, and communities.
Bianca Briciu is an assistant professor in the School of Transformative Leadership and Spirituality at Saint Paul University in Ottawa. Her work bridges scholarship and practice at the intersection of leadership, spirituality, and human development. With a background spanning cultural mediations, film, and gender studies, and lived experience across multiple cultures, she brings a rich global perspective to her teaching and research. Dr. Briciu focuses on cultivating multidimensional intelligence—cognitive, embodied, emotional, and spiritual—and on exploring how mindfulness, empathy, and compassion can foster resilience and transformation. Her current projects emphasize transformative education, preparing leaders to advance justice, equity, and flourishing communities.
2025-26 Nova Media Fellows will discuss their work exploring interconnections between health and the built environment, climate crises, environmental noise, caregiving and mental health, and the positive health movement.
Dec. 11, 2 – 4 pm EST
Rufus Pollock is an entrepreneur, activist, and author as well as a longterm Zen practitioner. He is passionate about finding wiser ways to live together and envisions a world of love, abundance, and wisdom. He has founded several successful for-profit and nonprofit initiatives (and some unsuccessful ones) including Life Itself, A Second Renaissance, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Datopian. His 2018 book Open Revolution is about making a radically freer and fairer information age and has been translated into multiple languages. His next book Wiser Societies is about the cultural dark matter that enables societies to be wiser (and more well). He is a previous Mead Fellow in economics at the University of Cambridge as well as a Shuttleworth and Ashoka Fellow. A recognized global expert on the information society, he has worked with G7 governments, IGOs like the UN, Fortune 500 companies as well as many civil society organizations. He holds a PhD in economics and a double first in mathematics from the University of Cambridge.
Karen O’Brien is a professor in the department of sociology and human geography at the University of Oslo, Norway, and cofounder of cCHANGE, a company that promotes conscious and collaborative approaches to sustainability transformations. With 35 years of research experience, her work explores how beliefs, values, worldviews, and paradigms influence systems change and social change. Karen’s recent research focuses on fractal approaches to scaling transformative change and the potential for quantum social change in theory and practice. She has participated in four IPCC reports and was cochair of the International Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Transformative Change Assessment. In 2021, she was co-recipient of the BBVA Foundation’s Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Climate Change.
Bruce Goldstein is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Design and a research associate in the Institute of Behavioral Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, where his work bridges academic inquiry with real-world transformation efforts. His research focuses on how communities, practitioners, and experts develop trusting partnerships to cocreate solutions for complex social-ecological challenges. Central to Bruce’s work is an exploration of organizational strategies, leadership models, and governance frameworks that foster both local innovation and global dissemination. His recent work explores how leaders in translocal networks leverage paradoxical tensions—like harmony and disruption, and reflection and action—to generate learning and scale sustainability solutions, creating adaptive environments that foster innovation across diverse contexts. He leads the Transformations Conference Series and Community of Practice, which has convened multiple international events to explore sustainability transformations.
Hannah Gosnell is a professor of geography at Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. Her research focuses on transformations to sustainability, agricultural landscape change, rural sustainability, and land and water conservation from a social-ecological systems perspective. She is especially interested in how worldviews, laws, and institutions evolve to reflect changing geographies and under what conditions they can facilitate transformation in practical, political, and personal spheres. Her work reflects a belief that collaborative and interdisciplinary solutions to conservation challenges involving all affected stakeholders are likely to be more durable and equitable than ones that are top-down or purely technical.
Pål Dobrin, founder of the CARE Meditation Teacher and Changemaker Training, is a long term meditation practitioner and method developer specialized in bringing inner development into new fields. He has a diverse background ranging from developmental work, international crisis management and peace building, psychology, to mobile and virtual reality application development. Pål has more than 20 years of meditation experience and has taught various contemplative traditions of wisdom. He has extensive experience in guiding people through inner transformation processes with the help of techniques from ancient wisdom traditions. He does so in many different contexts ranging from training future psychiatrists in emotion skills to helping people recover from addiction or burnout—with the common aspiration of nurturing compassion. He is currently working to launch the Transformations Forum.
David Manuel-Navarrete applies an existential perspective to study deliberate transformations in social-ecological and technological systems, such as cities or coastal communities, including the subjective dimension of such transformations. His research aims at enhancing societies’ capacity to purposely deliver structural changes that simultaneously reduce inequality and sustain the planet’s web of life. As a sustainability scholar, he focuses on promoting climate change adaptation and tourism sustainability. His most recent research explores adaptation, resilience, and transformation of water infrastructures in Mexico City, and the promotion of Indigenous languages to advance sustainability in the Amazon. Professor Manuel-Navarrete worked as a consultant for the United Nations and as a researcher at King’s College London and the Free University of Berlin. He has conducted sustainability research and assessments in Argentina, Brazil, Central America, and Mexico. He teaches international development and sustainability and sustainability science.
Ioan Fazey is professor of the social dimensions of environment and change and director of strategy for the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of York, U.K. His research, teaching, and facilitation focus on helping individuals, businesses, organizations, and society develop an understanding of, and capacity for, stewarding transformations to regenerative futures. Ioan has over 80 research publications in resilience, transformation, change, and sustainability and how our knowledge systems—universities and research institutes—will need to transform to support wider societal change. Ioan is also an experienced shamanic practitioner and trainer, helping people work with inner transformations needed for outer change. He is the founder of ShamanicHealing.org.uk, where he leads training programs to help individuals and groups shift their sense of purpose and identity and reconnect with the regenerative power of nature to better align with a rapidly changing world.
Mohammed Mohammed is a senior program officer at the Fetzer Institute. Trained in the humanities, social science, and human-computer interaction, Mohammed is a philanthropy professional with decades of experience leading research, technology development, and programmatical projects around the world. He has worked in the academic and corporate sectors before transitioning to philanthropy. He believes in blurring boundaries of any kind, be it disciplines, functions, or identities, because creativity happens in the spaces between. “Love is the source of everything and the ultimate destination of humanity, I think. It is surprising that we often forget to make it the animating principle of our institutions, communities, and personal lives. Our world needs love more than anything else. Love that is transcendent, love that is inclusive, love that is accompanied by forgiveness, love that is unconditional.”
Gretchen Steidle is director of spirituality and social change and the founder and president of Circles for Conscious Change, a transformative education firm working with social entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and corporations on the use of mindfulness as a design tool for social innovation. Gretchen is also the founder and president of Global Grassroots, an international organization that operated a social venture incubator and mindful-leadership program for women and girls in East Africa. She has an MBA from the Tuck School at Dartmouth and a BA in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia. Gretchen is author of Leading from Within: Conscious Social Change and Mindfulness for Social Innovation (MIT Press, 2017) and lectures and teaches on mindfulness and social change worldwide. A certified integrative breathworker, Gretchen has been delivering breath-based therapeutic practices, resilience training, and trauma healing since 2002 to a range of individuals globally, including survivors of and first responders to war and mass disaster. In 2007, Gretchen was honored by World Business Magazine and Shell as one of the top International 35 Women Under 35.
Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.
Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”
“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad.
When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.)
“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”
Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.”
Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”
In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.”
Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding.
There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.
Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors.
“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”
Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.
Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.
Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.