DALLAS (SMU) – The New York Times best-selling author of The Happiness Advantage and Before Happiness, Shawn Achor, will be the featured speaker at The Ebby Halliday Companies Lecture of the Willis M. Tate Distinguished Lecture Series at SMU Tuesday, April 10.

Achor will answer questions at the Turner Construction/Wells Fargo Tate Student Forum at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday in Hughes-Trigg Student Center Ballroom, 3140 Dyer St. The student forum is a lively question-and-answer session with Tate speakers for area high school students, SMU students, faculty and staff.

The evening lecture will begin at 8 p.m. Tuesday at SMU’s McFarlin Auditorium, 6405 Boaz Lane. 

Shawn Achor is The New York Times best-selling author of The Happiness Advantage and Before Happiness. He spent 12 years at Harvard, where he won more than a dozen distinguished teaching awards and delivered lectures on positive psychology in the most popular class at Harvard. Achor graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and earned a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics.

Achor has since become one of the world’s leading experts on the connection between happiness and success. He has worked with more than a third of the Fortune 100 companies as well as the NFL, Pentagon and U.S. Department of the Treasury.

To do his work, Achor has traveled to 51 countries, speaking to farmers in Zimbabwe, CEOs in China, doctors in Dubai and schoolchildren in South Africa. In 2014, Oprah Winfrey interviewed him for two hours about the science of happiness and meaning. Achor’s research on happiness made the cover of Harvard Business Review. His TED talk is one of the most popular of all time, with more than 16 million views, and his lecture airing on PBS has millions of viewers.

 MEDIA GUIDELINES

Media wishing to cover either the student forum or the evening lecture should contact SMU’s Office of News and Communications at (214) 768-7650 by noon Tuesday, April 10, to confirm attendance, clarify taping and photo guidelines and to obtain parking information.

Still photography using available light will be permitted during the first five minutes of the forum from assigned areas. No flash photography. Audio and video taping of the forum is allowed only during the first five minutes of the question and answer session.

Still photography using available light will be permitted during the first five minutes of the evening lecture from assigned areas. No flash photography. Audio and video taping of the lecture is allowed only during the first 5 minutes of the lecture.