Promoting Student Success Series
The Promoting Student Success Series encourages campus-wide conversations about promoting and advancing the culture of student success. This lecture series has been designed to inform the development of a vision for the role of WSU educators in promoting student success.
Each academic year, WSU educators hear from nationally renowned speakers regarding student success efforts in various contexts. Our goal is to identify strategies to better coordinate WSU efforts around student success and better define the roles of educators in promoting student success.
2026-2027
August 17, 2026
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Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management
10:30 a.m. Keynote Address
Browning Center, Austad Theater
Join us at this keynote event to enter a raffle for a Park City vacation giveaway.
To reach your highest career goals, you need to cultivate a mindset of mastery: one that lets you learn from your failures as well as your successes. Lauren Eskreis-Winkler is one of the world’s foremost voices on resilience, actually learning from your mistakes, and achieving your individual and organizational goals.
Lauren Eskreis-Winkler earned her PhD in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Working with Dr. Angela Duckworth, she has developed and disseminated grit interventions to over 50,000 individuals in the U.S., West Africa, Australia, Macedonia, and the UK. These interventions aim to build grit in individuals across the spectrum – struggling athletes, students in grade school and college, individuals in the workforce, smokers trying to quit smoking, and unemployed individuals on the job market. Lauren has collaborated with businesses, educational organizations, Major League Baseball teams, and the World Bank.
1 p.m. Workshop
Lindquist Hall, Room 101 | Light Refreshments Served
Speaker Bio
Lauren Eskreis-Winkler is an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where she researches motivation and achievement. Her work on mastery and learning from failure is crucial in helping people reach their goals, no matter their situation in life.
Formerly a post-doctoral fellow at the Wharton School (as well as a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Character Lab), Lauren has designed and implemented numerous interventions alongside #1 New York Times bestselling author Angela Duckworth (Grit). Together, they have successfully reached everyone from struggling athletes, to students in grade school and college, to individuals at every level of the workforce. Her work reveals a critical fact: “Grit is not only important, but also malleable and can be encouraged via intervention.”
Named to the prestigious Poets & Quants list of 40-Under-40 MBA professors, Lauren is a dynamic and engaging speaker with deep experience in the corporate world. Her sessions prime audiences on the cutting-edge science of grit, using fun intervention techniques that work empirically to increase motivation, resilience, and other qualities that cultivate a mindset of mastery. Her interactive talks can be used for individual character-building, or to nurture a corporate-wide culture of mastery. Lauren earned her PhD in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
