John Coffey is currently an Associate Professor at Sewanee: The University of the South and an Assistant Professor Adjunct at the Yale Child Study Center. He earned his Ph.D. in Positive Developmental Psychology, his MSW in 2007, and his MA in psychology in 2012. He currently studies emotions and relationships during development. He has served as the President for the Student Division of the International Positive Psychology Association. In the past, he has worked as a family therapist, served on non-profit boards, and worked in schools with children from troubled backgrounds as part of his mission to help children and families thrive.In his research, he adopts a developmental systems perspective (Lerner et al., 2005) focused on human plasticity as a way to understand early life roots of later well-being. John integrates contemporary developmental theories of relationships and emotions with positive psychology theories of well-being to test early life determinants (e.g., caregiver-child relationship, emotions) of adolescent and adult indicators of well-being (e.g., physiological indicators of health, life satisfaction) and maladaptation (i.e., rumination, depression) by linking them to individual and contextual factors in infancy and childhood. Adult well-being literature often includes psychological constructs (e.g., life satisfaction, emotion regulation) that have not fully developed for infants and children. His research seeks to identify childhood factors that precede and shape these later life constructs to broaden understanding of well-being and to prevent psychopathology.