Our Vision

Pursuit-of-Happiness.org strives to empower individuals with the scientific knowledge and life skills needed to build happy and meaningful lives.

Who we are

We are a group of scientists and educators dedicated to the advancement of scientific knowledge about happiness and depression prevention. We manage a multimedia educational platform (this website), as well as various hybrid, online, and onsite educational programs, focused on discoveries related to happiness and psychological well-being. Thanks to the heartfelt dedication of numerous volunteers and a generous in-kind marketing grant from Google Inc., about 12 million visitors, including faculty and students from 1,500 secondary schools, 2,500 universities, as well as governmental organizations from around the globe, have accessed our educational resources.
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Our Philosophy

The Pursuit of Happiness is an essential human right. Both Confucius and Socrates insisted that well-being and personal growth were a major purpose of life, and a central goal of education. Thomas Jefferson and the founders of U.S. government recognized this.

More than two hundred years later, our schools and universities are still neglecting these goals. We are so busy pursuing intellectual skills that we have neglected the pursuit of happiness. We have forgotten Aristotle’s warning: Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
Thanks to the recent emergence of Positive Psychology and the new “Science of Happiness” a wealth of scientific information on psychological well-being is being generated. Science took us to the moon and back. Thanks to science the whole world is linked by a worldwide web. Now science is revealing surprising secrets about our well-being. 

Now that a perfect storm of challenges, including the impact of rapid modernization, are sweeping the world, depression and self-harm have taken on still more urgency.

Our Mission

Pursuit-of-Happiness.org is a volunteer-driven 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of well-being and depression prevention.

Our team follows the Science of Happiness as it unfolds, in the peer-reviewed work of scientists around the world.
Recent scientific discoveries show that specific life skills, such as practicing acts of kindness, active listening, and mixed exercise, have a powerful impact on our mood.
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What We Do

  • Provide science-based information on the life skills and habits needed to enhance well-being, build resilience against depression and anxiety, and pursue a meaningful life.
  • Draw attention to the remarkable links between ancient wisdom and the new science of happiness.
  • Promote the pursuit of happiness through educational programs designed around the resulting knowledge base. We have collaborated with educational authorities in the U.S., China, and Europe to integrate the teaching of life skills related to psychological well-being with current curricula.

How We Do It

  • Identify, analyze, and review the rapidly expanding body of scientific studies on happiness and psychological well-being. The resulting information includes three grades of complexity: 
  • Bibliographies of studies on depression and psychological well-being. 
  • Discussions of the most scientifically rigorous studies organized into distinct categories (key correlates of well-being, ie. “the Habits of Happy People,” such as human relationships, physical well-being, flow, strengths, positive emotions etc. 
  • Reviews of the key studies related to each of the Habits that are easily understood by the general public and have actionable guidelines
  • Make the resulting information freely accessible via our website. Pursuit-of-Happiness.org (PoH) uses a broad variety of media to bring historical and scientific views on happiness to life.
  • Train educators (through online courses and onsite workshops) who can integrate the new science of happiness and well-being into school curricula and other institutions.
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Meet our team

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Mark Setton

Mark Setton, D.Phil., is the co-founder and CEO of Pursuit of Happiness. He has studied and published works on East Asian philosophy and well-being for the past 30 years. He earned his B.A. and M.A. at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, and his doctorate at Oxford University. He taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of California at Berkeley, Oxford University, and the University of Bridgeport. Mark and the POH team design and teach educational programs on the science and implementation of well-being for secondary schools, universities, and corporations such as Google, Mediamax, the China Accelerator, Dartmouth College, etc. He is especially interested in recent scientific discoveries on well-being, as well as the remarkable resonance between modern science and ancient wisdom.
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Paul Desan

Paul Desan, MD, Ph.D., is the co-founder of Pursuit of Happiness and the Director of the Psychiatric Consultation Service for Yale New Haven Hospital. He obtained an A.B. in psychology at Princeton University, a Ph.D. in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and an M.D. at Yale University School of Medicine. His present research interests include mood disorders, particularly Seasonal Affective Disorder or S.A.D., and how S.A.D. can be used as a model to measure the interaction of psychological factors such as stress and cognitive style, and biological factors including seasonal cues. One focus of interest is the question of how a resilient individual can regulate mood and maintain life satisfaction in medical illness and existential loss.
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Marie Cooke

Nick is in charge of marketing at Consulting Innovators. In addition, he is responsible for every aspect of day-to-day opMarie Cooke Ph.D., is COO of Pursuit of Happiness. She was previously the Further Education Programme Director at the Maryvale Institute, England, supporting hundreds of distance-learning, adult students from all over the world each year, studying theology and catechetics. She previously obtained a BA Div (Hons) and research MTh from Maynooth in Ireland, before completing a doctorate at the University of Glasgow. Marie successfully initiated and led a peer wellbeing support programme for University of Strathclyde students which utilised POH training and contributed to research. Born in Dumbarton, Scotland, Marie has lived and worked in ten cities from Berlin to Inverness. With decades of experience in youth work, chaplaincy and project management, Marie is currently the MDS Support Officer for the Church of Scotland in Glasgow Presbytery.erations at the company, from course design to data reporting and analytics. He holds a BS in Business degree from the Princeton University

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