Katherine Peil Kauffman

Katherine Peil Kauffman is the founding director of EFS International, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering “emotional wisdom.” Her work addresses the physical substrates and biological functions that undergird emotional behaviors, personal feelings, and emotion-driven social interactions. Kauffman reframes emotion as an ancient “self-regulatory” sensori-motor guidance system hardwired within every living embodiment; one delivering vital information and an evolutionary logic that have remained opaque to science. A former affiliate of Northeastern University and Harvard Divinity School, she speaks internationally on the role of emotional sentience in human development, cognition and decision-making, emphasizing implications for public health, moral reasoning, and natural spirituality.