Founder & CEO
The Contentment Foundation

Dr. Daniel Cordaro is the Founder and CEO of the Contentment Foundation. He is an Ashoka Fellow, Edmund Hillary Fellow, UBS Global Visionary, and former faculty member at Yale and Columbia Universities. His foundation’s Cities of Wellbeing initiative provides lifesaving Tier 1 mental health support to large networks of schools around the world.

Daniel spent the last decade of his career studying what it means to live a flourishing life through the lens of human emotions. His research has studied over a dozen cultures across the globe, including making first contact with one of the last remaining uncontacted tribes left on earth (in Bhutan). He led three of the largest cross-cultural studies on human emotion ever conducted in the field of psychology, which are featured in the textbook Understanding Emotions.

Daniel earned his Ph.D. in Psychology and M.S. in Organic Chemistry from UC Berkeley, and later spent two years as the Director of Wellbeing at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. While there, he and his team inaugurated a new area of research on contentment by publishing some of the first original research on what it means to cultivate unconditional acceptance of the present moment.

Above all, Dr. Cordaro is a lover of truth, wisdom, and indestructible wellbeing. Along his journeys around the world, he became a dedicated introspector and questioner of assumptions - as his studies in psychology and philosophy began to unlock the mysteries of human flourishing. The culmination of this work now expresses through the Contentment Foundation as a service to humanity. Daniel’s personal audacious goal is to significantly improve the lives of one billion children and one billion adults - 25% of earth’s population - within his lifetime.