Stephen Joseph, PhD, studied psychology at the University of Ulster on the northern coast of Ireland before going on to study social psychology at the London School of Economics and London's Institute of Psychiatry, where he obtained his PhD, for which he investigated emotional processing in survivors of disaster. For the past 25 years, he has continued researching psychological trauma but has become more interested in the positive psychology of how people can overcome adversity. As a practitioner, he is a health and counseling psychologist with interests in psychotherapy and coaching. He has worked at the Universities of Ulster, Essex, and Warwick, and is now at the University of Nottingham, where he is professor in the School of Education and convenor for the human flourishing research group. When he is not working, Stephen likes to retreat to the hills of Donegal in Ireland, where he spends time looking out to sea and pondering the mysteries of life. He has published many scholarly papers and books, including Trauma, Recovery, and Growth (Wiley, 2008) and, most recently, What Doesn't Kill Us: The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth (Basic Books, 2011).