About — The Resilience Atlas™ | Understand. Strengthen. Transform.

Janeen Molchany

Founder & Chief Resilience Scientist

Ph.D. BCBA Foster Care Alumna Published Researcher Author

Janeen Molchany is a doctoral-level researcher, Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA), and the creator of the Resilience Atlas framework. Her career began in 2004 at a children's shelter and group home, where she witnessed firsthand how young people in crisis develop—or lose—the capacity to adapt and recover.

She then worked in Wraparound services for five years with at-risk youth, learning how relationship, meaning-making, and agency transform outcomes. Since 2013, she has continued her work with children in autism communities while publishing her doctoral dissertation that same year — research that would become the foundation for the Resilience Atlas framework.

Her 20+ years of direct clinical experience, combined with rigorous behavioral science and resilience research, enables her to create practical tools for understanding and building human resilience.

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A Mission Born from Lived Experience

The Resilience Atlas did not begin in a laboratory. It began in life. Janeen Molchany's journey through the foster care system gave her an intimate, firsthand understanding of adversity — and of the extraordinary capacity human beings have to adapt, recover, and grow through even the most challenging circumstances.

That personal experience became the foundation of a lifelong professional mission: to understand what makes resilience possible, and to make that understanding accessible to everyone. As a BCBA working with foster youth and families of autistic children, Janeen saw daily how resilience — or its absence — shaped lives and outcomes. She also saw how rarely people had real, science-based tools to understand their own resilience.

Janeen observed that most resilience tools treated resilience as a single trait, or focused on only one domain — psychology, spirituality, or physical wellness. Her 2013 doctoral dissertation revealed that resilience is fundamentally multidimensional: a constellation of capacities that interact in complex, personal, and deeply human ways.

The Resilience Atlas was created to reflect that complexity — giving people a map, not just a number, for understanding how they adapt under pressure.

Our Mission

"To make the science of resilience legible, personal, and actionable — so that every person can understand, cultivate, and share their capacity to grow through adversity."

We believe resilience is not something you either have or don't have. It is a set of learnable, developable capacities — and the first step is understanding where you already are and where you have room to grow. The Resilience Atlas exists to make that understanding possible for individuals, teams, and organizations.

The Research Foundation

The Resilience Atlas framework was built on rigorous academic research, including Janeen's 2013 published doctoral dissertation — a comprehensive study of resilience that drew on multiple theoretical traditions and original empirical data.

          2013
          Year of Published Dissertation
        

          6
          Psychometric Assessments Used
        

          18
          Resilience Exemplars Studied
        

          13+
          Years of Framework Refinement
        

The dissertation identified and validated a multidimensional model of resilience through in-depth interviews with 18 resilience exemplars — individuals who had demonstrated extraordinary resilience in the face of adversity — and through the administration of 6 validated psychometric assessments spanning emotional regulation, social support, purpose, coping, cognitive flexibility, and somatic awareness.

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Six Psychometric Assessments

The Resilience Atlas platform is grounded in Janeen Molchany's 2013 doctoral dissertation, which administered six validated psychometric instruments to 18 resilience exemplars. These assessments provided the scientific foundation for identifying and measuring the dimensions of resilience integrated throughout this platform:

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

A widely used instrument for understanding psychological personality types and preferences, providing insight into how individuals perceive the world and make decisions.

Resilience Scale (RS)

Measures the degree of individual resilience — the capacity to adapt to, withstand, and recover from adversity, hardship, and significant sources of stress.

VIA Character Strengths Survey (VIA)

Assesses positive character strengths and core virtues that contribute to personal fulfillment, well-being, and flourishing in the face of life's challenges.

MPS (Mental, Physical & Spiritual Scale)

Evaluates holistic well-being and balance across mental, physical, and spiritual domains — capturing the full-spectrum dimensions of human health and resilience.

Multiple Intelligence Inventory (MII)

Examines the various dimensions of human intelligence beyond traditional cognitive measures, reflecting Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences.

Self Transcendence Scale (STS)

Captures an individual's capacity for self transcendence — the ability to find meaning, connection, and perspective that extends beyond one's immediate self and circumstances.

How It Works

The Resilience Atlas translates doctoral-level research into an accessible, actionable experience anyone can complete in under 15 minutes:

Take the Assessment

Complete the 72-question resilience assessment, spanning all six dimensions.

Map Your Profile

Receive a personalized radar chart showing your unique resilience profile across six dimensions.

Read Your Report

Get a detailed, evidence-based narrative report interpreting your strengths and growth areas.

Track Your Growth

Retake over time to see how your resilience evolves using the longitudinal Atlas tracker.

Impact & Outcomes

The Resilience Atlas is designed to create meaningful, lasting change — for individuals navigating personal challenges, teams building collective strength, and organizations cultivating resilient cultures:

Self-Understanding

Individuals gain a clear, nuanced picture of their resilience — not a single score, but a full map.

Targeted Growth

Dimension-specific insights help people focus their development efforts where they matter most.

Team Resilience

Teams see aggregated profiles, identify collective gaps, and build shared resilience strategies.

Organizational Culture

Organizations embed resilience as a cultural value, not just an individual wellness initiative.

The Six Dimensions

The Six Dimensions of Resilience framework integrates findings from multiple scientific traditions. Each dimension reflects a distinct way that humans adapt to and recover from adversity:

Relational-Connective — social support and connection Cognitive-Narrative — reframing and perspective-taking Somatic-Regulative — physical regulation and body awareness Emotional-Adaptive — processing and moving through feelings Spiritual-Reflective — meaning, purpose, and values Agentic-Generative — action, agency, and forward movement

The atlas metaphor is intentional: a map doesn't tell you where to go — it helps you understand where you are and what paths are available. The Resilience Atlas does the same for your inner life.

Theoretical Foundations

The Resilience Atlas framework is grounded in peer-reviewed research across six disciplines:

Positive Psychology Resilience Science Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) Cross-Cultural Research Trauma-Informed Practice

The assessment instrument was developed through doctoral research and refined through iterative testing across clinical populations to ensure it reflects the full complexity of real human resilience.