Diala Hawi holds a Master's in clinical psychology from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. She has been a university psychology instructor as well as clinical psychometrician. Diala has worked in media ethics research, investigating effects of media coverage and messages on political affiliations and voting decisions. During the wars in Lebanon of 2006 and 2007, she was a volunteer relief provider and a psychosocial coordinator for a local NGO, where she organized workshops on postwar trauma, conflict resolution, dialogue, and group mediation. Diala is currently studying differences in interpretations of conflict and how perceptions of people's group relations could play long-term roles in the prevalence of prejudice and conflict. She would also like to investigate the potential effect of such factors as threat, personality, and ideologies in political affiliations and ultimately, political actions.

Manisha Gupta obtained a B.S. in Business Administration, and a B.A. in Social Welfare, from the University of California at Berkeley. She has spent the past few years conducting applied psychology work with non-profits in areas related to reducing prejudice and improving intergroup relations. Most recently, she worked as a cultural programming officer for International House in Australia, whose mission is to help increase intercultural understanding. As a team leader for Projects for Peace, Manisha helped develop a grant which is being used to help improve communication and understanding between the university and the local Aboriginal population.

Jaeshin Kim received a Master's degree in Cultural Psychology from Korea University in South Korea. He was an intern at the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Seoul, South Korea in 2008. His current research concerns the role that threat and fear play in promoting aggressive conflict. He also studies the influence of US citizens' emotional reaction to the 9/11 attacks on immigration attitudes and policy support.

Katya Migacheva studied foreign languages and cultures at Samara State Pedagogic University (Russia) and studied psychology at Indiana University-Purdue University (USA).  Katya has worked extensively with organizations promoting democratic values education in post-Soviet Russia and was one of the creators of educational programs on cultural tolerance for Jewish teenagers in Samara.  She has a keen interest in cross-cultural communication, humanistic pedagogy, democratic values, Arab-Israeli conflict, and the lessons of Holocaust.  Katya's current research concerns the facilitation of intergroup contact, trust, and tolerance in post-conflict societies.  She is also a part of a quantitative evaluation team for the Training Active Bystanders program,  implemented by the Quabbin Mediation Center, which focuses on promoting social competence and active bystandership among secondary schools in Western Massachusetts.

Ramila Usoof-Thowfeek received her Master's from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Psychology. She was a research scholar at the Solomon Asch Center for the study of Ethnopolitical conflict at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004-2005 and is also a trained mediator. Her current research focuses on how individuals are able to maintain the perception that they are moral, despite having committed moral transgressions. She also studies how different mechanisms are used in moral judgments depending on whether the transgression is interpersonal in nature or takes place on behalf of a group in an intergroup context. In addition, Ramila is interested in creating psychosocial intervention programs, which are culturally specific, for those affected by intergroup violence. Along this line, she conducts research in Sri Lanka looking at the influence of religious beliefs and practice on psychological resilience. 

  Amelie Werther has a Master's degree in Psychology from the Universität Trier, Germany.  Her research aims to understand and assess elements of respect related to group conflicts.  She also researches the attributional components with which we form evaluative judgments of other people. Amelie worked in Dr. Ilana Shapiro's research group on Comparing Conflict Interventions and in 2006 she was an intern at a non-governmental organization in Buenos Aires, Argentina: Fundacion Cambio Democratico.  This organization belongs to the network of Partners for Democratic Change and works to further democratization and participative conflict resolution (such as mediation) in Latin America.

Sven Berendes was a German DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst) Graduate exchange student from the Philipps Universität at Marburg, Germany. Sven attended UMass Amherst in Fall 2008, studying Social Psychology with a focus on Peace and Conflict studies. As a student assistant of the Social Psychology department in Marburg, he worked with Linda Tropp on intergroup conflict studies.

Adekemi (Kemi) Adesokan was a visiting student in the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program in Fall 2007. In collaboration with Dr. Linda Tropp and Dr. Rolf van Dick (University of Frankfurt), she conducted research focusing on intergroup contact among ethnic minority and majority status groups in the USA and Germany. Kemi completed her Masters degree in Psychology at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, and is now a doctoral student at Oxford Universty, UK.

Corinna Mertz was a visiting student from Fall 2007 to Spring 2008. During her stay she studied reasons for intergroup conflict and violence as well as means, e.g. intergroup contact, to improve intergroup relations. As a member of the RespectResearchGroup, she is currently working on her Master's degree in Psychology at the University of Hamburg in Germany.