Kristin Shannon chairs PSI Communications in Paris and San Francisco. An author, speaker, political and strategic planning consultant, she is expert in collaborative intelligence, consensus building tools, and cross-cultural communications. She designs and directs PSI workshops and trainings.

With a background in economics and cognitive neuroscience, she consults on both policy content and communications for international clients, and advises on political campaigns, including the first Obama campaign. She's engaged in a global research project on how we make decisions, and a new book on EQ -- Emotional intelligence.  

Kristin directed two national research institutes (Washington D.C. & Montreal, Canada) providing economic forecasting and policy options for NGOs, foundations, banks, energy, media, telecommunications companies, and governments, including the Canadian Prime Minister’s office and the White House. In addition to consulting with the US Federal Reserve, Federal and Provincial Ministers of Finance, Education, Health, The World Bank, etc., she has worked extensively with private sector clients. Corporate clients include Alcan, AT&T, Bell Canada, Canyon Ranch, CBS, CBC, Public Broadcasting, Roche, Citicorp, Shell, TransCanada Pipelines, Imperial Oil, Safeway, Sears, IBM, Weyerhaeuser, General Foods, Royal Bank of Canada, SRI International, and Wellington Management, where she modeled and coached their top-ranked investment analysts. 

Foundation clients include the Ford, Rockefeller and Mott Foundations, The Aspen Institute, and the Lilly Endowment, and Menniger. She raised funds for urban non-profits such as Delancy Street, and for wellness and biofeedback research at Langley Porter. She co-founded and developed $20 million for an NGO dedicated to technology transfer and sustainable growth. She co-chaired a multi-community alliance to protect old growth forests and salmon spawning grounds.

Kristin grew up behind-the-scenes in film making, with summers at Hollywood Professional School. A UCLA and Berkeley Regents scholar in pre-med and cognitive neuroscience, she also studied economics in Japan, in Japanese. She returned to Berkeley to update in neuroanatomy, facial recognition of emotion (Paul Ekman) and work with George Lakoff in psycholinguistics and metaphor.

She helped develop the field of psychographics -- value based population studies. Her psychology background includes Jungian studies, psychophysiology, Humanistic psychology and Transpersonal approaches. Kristin trained directly with Alexander Lowen, Virginia Satir, Eric Berne, Stan Grof, Fritz Perls, and Moshe Feldernkrais (movement). Later, after the popular psychology NLP field began to collect effective techniques from eclectic sources, she continued with Leslie Cameron Bandler, David Gordon, Tom Condon, Carol Erickson, Steve Gilligan, Tad James, Judith de Lozier, R. Bandler, Robert Dilts, Steve and Connierae Andreas. Her focus is modeling and transferring excellence.

She co-authored the best-selling “Next Canadian Economy” and is published in academic journals such as Princeton's Wilson Quarterly and the Journal of Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Her current book projects are “The New Biology of Genius,” which includes research on accelerated learning, brain plasticity and modeling, and EQ Emotional Intelligence.  A lifelong meditator in several traditions, she is grateful to Green Gulch Zen Center, and The Tibetan Center for Compassion and Wisdom (TCCW) founded by her teacher Arjia Rinpoche, former Abbot of Kumbum.

Other interests include art, improv comedy, aikido, memes, and dance. She divides her time between the San Francisco shore, and the Ile St. Louis, an island in the heart of Paris.