The president and founder of Internet Psychology Research Institute, Dr. Yanina Shapiro is a former engineer, college professor and internet entrepreneur. Her internet enterprises include Idea Merchants CO and Corporate Psychology & Mental Fitness. As she was spent increasing amounts of time on the internet, Dr. Shapiro became more and more absorbed with thoughts about how psychologists might help create user-centered web sites, the design and content of which would take into account the age, educational, and cultural backgrounds of the target audience. Hence, her idea of the Internet Psychology Research Institute - a virtual organization, whose faculty are academics without borders, whose high quality research benefits both general public and industry, and whose non-profit status does not mean losses.

An MSME graduate of a prestigious technical university in Moscow, Russia, Dr. Shapiro had enjoyed a successful engineering career in the USA, before she turned to the formal study of human cognition and memory at Harvard University. She held positions of high responsibility in private industry (Ford Motor Co., Exxon Research & Engineering, etc.) and the US government (Department of Transportation/Volpe Transportation Systems Center). She taught engineering sciences at Tufts University and Franklin Institute of Boston. Perhaps because Dr. Shapiro practiced engineering right until she began working on her doctoral dissertation at Harvard, her research interests have always revolved around human performance in everyday life rather than in research laboratories, where most of the research on human cognition and behavior has been conducted, mostly on non-human species. Her distrust of laboratory experiments on human behavior goes back to her unwitting participation in a huge and well-controlled experiment on social conditioning in the USSR, where she was born and grew up. She fled the USSR, as a political refugee, in the seventies, when the Cold War was still very hot.

As a doctoral student at Harvard University, Dr. Shapiro pursued her life-long interest in how people learn and remember and what role language plays in how they learn and what they remember. She studied cognitive and neuro sciences, human development, philosophy and education. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled "Towards a Neuropsychological Theory of Human Memory" was completed in 1991. She has continued her research, presenting its findings in a number of research papers and journal articles.

She has taught psychology at college level and has fond memories of that experience. As a college professor, Dr. Shapiro has designed and taught a spectrum of courses in cognitive and neuro sciences, and developmental and general psychology. It was then that she first realized that many of her students lacked the most rudimentary study, communication, organizational, and problem solving skills, which they needed to succeed in and after college. She incorporated the development of such skills into the courses she taught. She also coached her traditional and non-traditional students in their professional and personal development.. Later on, she worked with mentally retarded and developmentally delayed and/or psychotic children and adults for the state of Oregon, discovering in the process that around 90% of middle management in the fields of mental health and social services relied on Prozac and/or other drugs to maintain their well-being and self-worth. That discovery was shocking, but it was not the most disturbing discovery of that experience.

It is to her brief and intensely unhappy affair with the field of mental health that Dr. Shapiro owes both her ideas of Mental FitnessŪ and her first business business idea - Corporate Psychology & Mental Fitness, a consulting and training company. Building a business on a shoe string budget, meant becoming a jack of all trades, including web site design and internet marketing, and spending countless hours on the internet and writing email. Given Dr. Shapiro's fascination with the internet and her long standing interests in the psychology of naming/language and in how language affects our thoughts, memory, and actions, it was only natural that she became involved in such things as naming, branding, e-business marketing.

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