Larissa Loures

Larissa Loures is a Brazilian administrator and psychologist whose career has developed around organizational development and family therapy. She studied international business at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, in the late ’90s,and later psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil. She has several post-graduate degrees in Family Counseling, Relational Neuroscience, Family Therapy, and Executive Coaching. She has been working with transformational system approaches related to resilience and wellbeing since 1996, when she first met Dr. David Cooperrider at Nutrimental Foods, Brazil, conducting a whole system appreciative action-research intervention. After that, she worked on several Appreciative Inquiry projects with Cooperrider, including URI (United Religions Initiative), BAWB (Business as Agent of World Benefit), and WPEA(World Positive Education Accelerator). The WPEA was launched in 2018 in partnership with Dr. Martin Seligman, aiming at embedding Positive Psychology in schools to develop resilience and life skill competencies in students and their communities. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry (Champlain College, Vermont) and CEO and founder of the Instituto Educação Positiva (IEP/Brazil). She earned her master’s degree in Positive Organizational Psychology and Evaluation at Claremont Graduate School, where she is currently attending the Ph.D. program in Evaluation and Applied Research Methods.