Eranda Jayawickreme
My name is Eranda Jayawickreme and I’m the Harold W. Tribble Professor of Psychology and senior research fellow at the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. I received my Ph.D. in positive and social/personality psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. My research, which integrates my interests in both philosophy and psychology, focuses on post-traumatic growth as positive personality change, moral personality, wisdom, well-being and integrative theories of personality. I have worked with populations in Rwanda, Sri Lanka and various populations in the USA.
I’m currently the Project Leader for the Clarifying the Virtue Profile of the Excellent Thinker Project, with support from the John Templeton Foundation. I’m also a Science of Honesty Project Leader for the Honesty Project, an initiative exploring new directions in the study of the character virtue of honesty.
Until recently, I was the Project Leader (with Michael Lamb) of the Exemplar Interventions to Develop Character Project, an initiative that examined the role of moral exemplars in character development. I was also formally the Project Co-Leader for the Pathways to Character Project, an initiative examining the possibilities for the strengthening of character following adversity, challenge or failure, and the Project Leader for the Promoting Intellectual Humility Among Middle-School Students: Developing an Educational Film and Preliminary Intervention Strategy Project. From 2011 to 2014, I was the Project Leader for the Growth Initiative, which focused on improving the quality of research on post-traumatic growth.
I currently serve as an associate editor for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences, as well as for the journal Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, and am active in the Association for Research of Personality. In July 2023, I will become a senior associate editor of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
My awards include the 2023 Early Career Contributions Award from the International Society for the Science of Existential Psychology, the 2015 Rising Star award from the Association for Psychological Science (which recognizes outstanding psychological scientists in the earliest stages of their research career post-PhD whose innovative work has already advanced the field), Wake Forest’s 2018 Faculty Excellence in Research Award, a Mellon Refugee Initiative Fund Fellowship, and grants from the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton Religion Trust, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the European Association for Personality Psychology, and the Asia Foundation/ USAID. I am also a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP).