USCMA Connect

Dr Ruth Simpson is an executive coach, researcher, and founder of Animi, with over 20 years of experience coaching senior, executive, and board-level leaders. Before moving into coaching, Ruth spent her corporate career as a management consultant at PwC, and in sales, marketing, and distribution roles at Mobil Oil and Esso Petroleum. 
She holds a PhD and an MSc in Coaching and Development and is accredited by the EMCC to Master Practitioner level under the Global EIA framework. Ruth's PhD — undertaken at Oxford Brookes University and presented at its 2026 Research Conference — breaks new ground by examining how group coaching supports leaders making the transition into senior positions. 
She developed the first empirically grounded theory of how group coaching works for leaders in a workplace context and produced a practical group coaching framework applicable to organisations grappling with leadership development, succession, and collective intelligence. Her upcoming book will be called Developing Collective Leaders: The Group Coaching Advantage.
Alongside her practice, Ruth is Vice Chair of Bourne Education, a large Multi Academy Trust in the Southeast of England, and she hosts her own podcast, The Evolution of Leadership. Her clients describe her as pragmatic, direct, skilled, flexible, and empathetic.

Zeena Hicks is a positive psychologist, executive coach, and doctoral researcher whose work explores how people build inner psychological capacity when pressure doesn’t let up. Known by many of her clients as The Positivity Doctor, Zeena bridges rigorous science with lived experience, translating positive psychology, neuroscience, and coaching psychology into grounded, self-directed practices. Her current doctoral research  at Oxford Brookes, UK, examines how positive self-coaching, particularly when supported by peer connection, can create powerful ripple effects across families, workplaces, and wider systems. 
This conversation explores what psychological sustainability really means for coaches, leaders, educators, and parents operating under chronic demand. We also explore the realities for parents of neurodivergent children and how positive psychology, according to Zeena helped her  ‘survive some dark moments as a parent’

Oscar Trimboli is an executive coach, author, speaker, and creator of the Deep Listening podcast and framework. With a career spanning senior leadership roles at global tech companies such as Microsoft and Vodafone, Oscar has dedicated his later career to helping people become deeply attentive and impactful listeners. He is the author of several books including How to Listen: Discover the Hidden Key to Better Communication.
His work centers around the transformative power of listening—not just hearing the words, but decoding the unsaid, sensing meaning, and guiding conversations toward deeper insight. His research includes extensive analysis of over 35, 000  of workplace conversations, to understand how people listen.

Tracy is a renowned Master Certified Coach, International Speaker, Mentor, Facilitator and Author, and has been at the forefront of the coaching field since 2001. She has worked with leaders in for-profit and non-profit organisations in fields from healthcare, finance, aged care, government, academia, technology, construction, retail, travel and hospitality. 
She has also worked in Parenting based coaching and specialises in Gold Mind play having written and spoken in this specialised topic.
Tracy also supports the development of individual coaches through mentoring and supervision, to develop competence, capability and capacity.Tracy provides leadership to the coaching community through her contribution to the International Coaching Federation Australasia (ICFA) and ICF Global Communities, and previously to the Asia Pacific Alliance of Coaches.

Dr. Laura Hefer is a researcher, consultant, and speaker whose PhD from the University of Sydney Business School focuses on the organisational use of AI meeting assistants. Her work uniquely blends information systems, organisational psychology, and identity theory to explore how AI technologies are shaping workplace dynamics.
Originally trained in coaching psychology, Dr. Hefer later became fascinated by how digital tools—especially those that record and summarise meetings—change the way people manage impressions and identities at work. Her PhD investigates not only the technical implementation of AI meeting assistants but also the social and psychological consequences for those who use or are affected by these tools.
She has published papers in top-tier conferences (PACIS and ACIS), exploring the unacknowledged assumptions baked into AI meeting assistant designs and their effects on productivity, fairness, identity construction, and power.