Academic Experience

David Tien, Ph.D., is a private advisor to senior leaders and an academic trained in philosophy, psychology, and Asian intellectual history and culture. He is a Brown University Certified Leadership and Performance Coach, an ICF Certified Coach, and a Level 3 Certified Practitioner of Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy.

He combines Ph.D. education in both Asian Languages & Cultures and Philosophy, with graduate study at the University of Michigan and the University of Toronto. His academic work has focused on moral psychology, philosophical psychology, and Asian religious philosophy, with particular attention to how values, attachment, identity, and social incentives shape human judgment and behavior. This research background later informed his applied work on attraction, attachment, and relational decision-making, approached through an interdisciplinary lens that draws on philosophy, psychology, behavioral science, and empirical social research.

Dr. Tien has held numerous academic fellowships, such as at Harvard, Princeton, the University of Michigan, Peking University, and Tsinghua University in Beijing, as well as national research support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. His scholarly training spans Asian cultures, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, literature, history, and the behavioral sciences. He has working research knowledge of Modern and Classical Chinese, Japanese, French, and Biblical Greek.

In parallel with his academic career, Dr. Tien pursued formal clinical and therapeutic training. In addition to advanced certification in IFS Therapy, he has completed structured training in Schema Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Gestalt Therapy, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), among others. This clinical education informs his advisory work, particularly where leadership, judgment, and relational strain intersect.

Dr. Tien began his professorial career as a tenure-track professor in the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore, where he taught Asian religious philosophy, moral philosophy, and philosophical psychology. He has published academic research in these areas and continues to write at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and human decision-making.

Across both academic and applied contexts, his work has remained centered on a single question: how intelligent, capable people come to misjudge what matters, and how clarity of values can restore coherence to decision-making, relationships, and leadership. His current work continues to bridge scholarship and practice, with an emphasis on long-horizon judgment, moral seriousness, and the conditions under which human flourishing becomes possible.