Ayahito Ito is a Senior Assistant Professor at Tohoku University and Executive Director of the Japan Community Sheds Association (JCSA). His research spans social neuroscience and social psychology, focusing on the cognitive and neural mechanisms that shape human communication. Building on this work, he now leads research on the development and evaluation of inclusive community spaces (“Community Sheds” and “Men’s Sheds”) and on the primary prevention of social isolation and loneliness. His honors include the JSPS Prize (2025) and the MEXT Young Scientists’ Prize (2024), among others.

Prof Clifford Stevenson is Distinguished Professor at Tohoku University, Japan, and Professor of Social Psychology at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His work is grounded in the Applied Social Identity Approach, examining how the presence, absence, and quality of group identifications shape people’s capacity to cope with adversity. His research explores the psychological processes through which shared identities promote wellbeing, resilience, and social connection. In particular, he focuses on how identification with local neighbourhoods and communities can reduce loneliness, strengthen mutual support, and enable collective responses to social, economic, and environmental challenges facing contemporary societies.

Dr Niamh McNamara is an Associate Professor of Social Psychology at Nottingham Trent University. Her research examines how social identity, belonging, and loneliness shape mental health, with a particular focus on eating disorder recovery. She has led significant advances in understanding identity change and developed REConnect, the first structured peer delivered intervention targeting social functioning in recovery. Her work integrates coproduction, and community partnerships to address health inequalities and strengthen community based approaches to reducing loneliness. Niamh provides research leadership as Lead of the Groups, Identities & Health Research Group and as Deputy Director of the Centre for Research on Social Interaction.

Risa Takashima, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Hokkaido University, Japan, and an occupational therapist. Her research focuses on community-based approaches to preventing loneliness and social isolation in later life, with a particular interest in Men’s Sheds and other inclusive community spaces. Using participatory and mixed-methods research, she examines how social connection is formed through everyday activities and peer support, and how these processes can be sustained in local contexts. She collaborates internationally to advance person-centred, culturally responsive research and practice, and to translate findings into scalable strategies for community wellbeing in ageing societies.

Alex Haslam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Exeter and Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland. He has written 16 books and over 350 peer-reviewed articles exploring the contribution of group processes to social and organizational functioning with a particular emphasis on leadership and health. Alex has received a range of major awards from scientific bodies around the world including recognition for distinguished contributions to psychological science from both the British and Australian Psychological Societies. In 2022 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for service to the field of psychology.

Catherine Haslam is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Queensland and a clinical academic whose work focuses on the social and cognitive impacts of identity-changing life transitions and interventions to manage these. Her research on social connectedness, health and well-being has contributed to a body of work on the social cure published in two volumes — Social Cure: Identity, Health and Well-being (2012) and The New Psychology of Health: Unlocking the social cure (2018). This work has informed the GROUPS 4 HEALTH program, a manualised social identity intervention supporting people to manage their social connectedness to support health.

Darel Cookson is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Nottingham Trent University. Her research explores the impact of conspiracy beliefs on individuals and society. She investigates how social identities and psychological factors influence beliefs and develops social-based interventions aimed at reducing the negative effects of these beliefs, promoting social connection.

Dr Lydia Harkin is a leading researcher at Nottingham Trent University on loneliness and digital technologies in times of chronic illness and older age. She has mixed methods expertise and has managed multidisciplinary projects involving collaborators from public and voluntary sectors. She is committed to research which can reduce loneliness for vulnerable populations.

Dr Beth Jones is a Senior Lecturer whose research examines loneliness within transgender and gender diverse (TGD) communities. She investigates how stigma, social connectedness, and mental health intersect, co-designing evidence-based strategies to enhance wellbeing and developing initiatives that challenge discriminatory attitudes to foster more inclusive societies.

Blerina Kellezi is an Associate Professor in Social and Trauma Psychology at Nottingham Trent University. Blerina leads the Trauma, Social Isolation and Mental Health research group and is co-director of the Centre for Public and Psychosocial Health at NTU. Blerina’s work investigates the collective impact and responses to mass human rights violations focusing on collective resilience, vulnerability, resistance and justice.

Dr. Juliet Wakefield is a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at Nottingham Trent University. Her research applies the Social Identity Approach to explore the implications of group membership for people’s everyday lives. This includes help-giving/help-seeking behaviour and the importance of social groups for the health and wellbeing of vulnerable populations.

Dr Mhairi Bowe is an Associate Professor in Applied Social Psychology and Director of the Social Impact Laboratory at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. Mhairi is mixed methods researcher specialising in social identity processes and how they relate to contemporary health and community challenges such as loneliness, poverty, and marginalisation.

Gabriele Bellucci is a Lecturer of Social Neuroscience and Director of the Centre for Decision Sciences and the Theoretical Social Neuroscience Lab at RHUL. He is interested in testing and developing theories of social behavior, cognition and neuroscience using computational modelling and neuroimaging techniques.

Hirotaka Imada is a social psychologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he leads the Cooperation and Intergroup Processes Lab. His research explores the evolutionary and psychological foundations of human cooperation, with a particular focus on intergroup and intergenerational contexts.

Melinda Heinz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family, Aging, and Counseling at the University of Northern Iowa. She teaches courses in Gerontology. Her research focuses on purpose and meaning in life in older adulthood. Much of her work has focused on exploring the benefits of Men’s Sheds in the U.S. and other countries. In 2024, she started the first Men’s Shed in Iowa, Cedar Valley Men’s Shed, located in Cedar Falls.

Dr. Masakazu Motoki is an Associate Professor at the Organization for Innovations in Data Synergy, Tohoku University, Japan. Given the diverse range of research methodologies, he explores the essential infrastructures required to foster a robust research data ecosystem. His work focuses on developing efficient data management environments and databases to support the advancement of ICCLP.

Toshiyuki Himichi is an Associate Professor at Kochi University of Technology. He is a social psychologist whose research focuses on the mechanisms underlying empathy and the ability to think about psychologically distant objects from one’s own perspective.

Aya Toyoshima, PhD, is a Lecturer at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shimane University. Her research spans social psychology and gerontology, focusing on the psychological mechanisms of loneliness and their impact on well-being across the lifespan. By identifying the social cognitive biases arising from loneliness, she is developing behavioral indicators through experimental methods to capture these distortions, aiming to prevent social isolation and support successful aging.

Ryuta Onishi is a researcher at Tohoku University, Japan, working in public health nursing and community health. His research examines how social relationships, digital environments, and everyday care practices shape wellbeing across the life course, with a particular focus on parenting, social connectedness, and older adults’ health. Using quantitative and qualitative approaches, he aims to generate evidence that supports community-based prevention of loneliness and promotes healthier family and community lives.

Saori Kubo is an Associate Professor at Tohoku University, specializing in psychometrics and educational measurement. Her research interests lie in the methods of multivariate analysis and mathematical modeling—including structural equation modeling (SEM) and item response theory (IRT)—and their application to psychological and educational data. She possesses particular expertise in evaluating the reliability and validity of psychological scales and in methodologies for test linking.

Professor in the Division of Image Statistics at the Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization, Tohoku University, specializing in neuroradiology.

Stefano Ciaffoni (He/Him) is a social psychologist interested in how social identities and structural inequalities shape wellbeing. He received his PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Bologna in 2024.
His research examines gender inequality, sexual prejudice, and stigma toward marginalized groups, and his work spans both academic and applied contexts, including community-based mental health projects and research on loneliness and aging. His current research examines loneliness and loneliness reduction programs through a social identity lens.

Shoko Watanabe is a Specially Appointed Assistant Professor at Tohoku University. Her research examines how individuals navigate conflicts and uncertainties regarding their worldviews and social identities. Her work covers a variety of topics, including loneliness and social isolation, the predictors and consequences of religious deidentification, and mechanisms that drive or disrupt interdisciplinary collaboration. Additionally, she investigates how people evaluate reconciliatory efforts in interpersonal conflicts and how group-based connections and trust develop over time. To explore these topics, she employs a multi-method approach, combining original lab and online experiments with secondary data analysis using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM).

Rika Hirayama, MSc (Health Sciences), is an occupational therapist and graduate researcher at the Graduate School of Health Sciences, Hokkaido University, Japan. Her research focuses on preventing social isolation and loneliness among older men, particularly in Men’s Sheds. She uses mixed methods, integrating qualitative fieldwork with quantitative analysis.

Daniel is a PhD Candidate at Nottingham Trent University interested in social identity, community interventions, leadership, men’s health and loneliness. His PhD examines how social identity processes within Men’s Sheds support wellbeing in the UK and Japan, in collaboration with Tohoku University, Hokkaido University and the University of Queensland.