Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., is Professor and Director of the Baylor Psychiatry Clinic at the Baylor College of Medicine and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute in Houston, Texas. He was previously Director of the Menninger Hospital in Topeka, Kansas.Dr. Gabbard is the author or editor of more than fifteen books and currently is joint Editor-in-Chief and Editor for North America of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. His numerous awards include the 2000 Mary Sigourney Award for outstanding contributions to psychoanalysis.

Otto Friedmann Kernberg is a psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is most widely known for his psychoanalytic theories on borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology. In addition, his work has been central in integrating postwar ego psychology (which was primarily developed in the United States and the United Kingdom) with Kleinian and other object relations perspectives (which was developed primarily in the United Kingdom and South America). His integrative writings were central to the development of modern object relations, a theory of mind that is perhaps the theory most widely accepted among modern psychoanalysts.

Michaela Swales PhD is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Professor in Clinical Psychology on the North Wales Clinical Psychology Programme, Bangor University.

She trained in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy in Seattle in 1994 / 95 with Marsha Linehan and for twenty years ran a clinical programme for suicidal young people in an inpatient service. Professor Swales is the Director of the British Isles Training Team, an International Affiliate of the Linehan Institute. She has trained more than a thousand professionals in DBT, seeding over 400 programmes, in both the UK and further afield.

She co-authored, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy: Distinctive Features (2009; 2017) and Changing Behavior in DBT: Problem-Solving in Action (2015). She is the Editor of the Oxford Handbook of DBT (2019). Her primary research interest is the effective implementation of evidence-based psychological therapies in routine clinical practice. Professor Swales was a member of the Working Group on Classification of Personality Disorders, reporting to the World Health Organisation (WHO) International Advisory Group for the Revision of ICD-10 Mental and Behavioural Disorders. 

Clara Mucci is Full Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Bergamo, where she was for years Full Professor of English Literature and Shakespearean Theatre.

She is a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist and lecturer at the SIPP in Milan (Italian Society of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy), teaching analyst and supervisor for the Italian Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Sandor Ferenczi, he holds a PhD in Literature and Psychoanalysis from Emory University (Atlanta), and carried out (after a second degree in clinical psychology and specialisation at the SIPP in Milan) an internship at the Institute for Personality Disorders in New York directed by Otto Kernberg.

She is certified to carry out (for research and clinical purposes) the Adult Attachment Interview (under the direction of Mary Main and Erik Hesse, Berkeley University, California) and to assess the RF (Reflective functioning, a measure to evaluate the ability to mentalize), certification obtained with Howard Steele (New School for Social Research, New York).

Paul Links is Professor with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, McMaster University, Hamilton ON, Canada. From 2012 until 2016, Dr. Links served as the Professor and Chair, Department of Psychiatry, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, The University of Western Ontario, Chief of Psychiatry, London Health Sciences Centre and St. Joseph’s Health Care, London, Ontario.  Prior to coming to Western University, Dr. Links was holder of the Arthur Sommer Rotenberg Chair in Suicide Studies, University of Toronto for three terms. 

This Chair was the first in North America dedicated to suicide research.  Dr. Links was the former President for the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention (CASP) and former President of the Association for Research on Personality Disorders. Dr. Links served as the Editor of the Journal of Personality Disorders from 2009-2011. 

He was previously on the Editorial Board of Canadian Journal of Psychiatry.  He has published over 160 articles in scientific journals and four books. As an investigator he has received research grants from many agencies including Health and Welfare Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Health, the Ontario Mental Health Foundation, Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario. 

In October 2009, Dr. Links was awarded the CASP Research Award for outstanding contributions to the field of suicide research in Canada.  In May 2013, Dr. Links received the Borderline Personality Disorder Resource Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Severe Personality Disorders.  

Clinical psychologist with a degree in Philosophy and in Psychology, she is an adjunct professor at the PhD Course in Health Psychology of the University La Sapienza of Roma. She has worked in a Public Health Center for ten years, is in private practice since 1980 and supervises the work of professionals and groups both in private and public settings. Teacher of the Milan Family Therapy School (Boscolo & Cecchin), has edited many books and articles.