Work, Family & Health Network Researchers
Dr. Alameida, professor of human development and family studies at Pennsylvania State University, is a life-span developmental psychologist with a primary focus on the effects of biological and self-reported indicators of stress on health and coping during middle adulthood. His primary interest is the role of daily stress on healthy aging but has also examined stress processes in specific populations and contexts, such as the workplace and family interactions, parents of children with developmental disabilities, and family caregivers. Notedly, Alameida developed an instrument, the Daily Inventory of Stressful Experiences, that has been used in large scale epidemiologic and intervention studies on health and well-being. He directed the Workplace Practices and Daily Family Well-Being Project which is a component of the Work, Family & Health Study.
Dr. Berkman, the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is an internationally recognized social epidemiologist whose work focuses on social influences on health outcomes. She has done extensive research on social inequalities in health related to socioeconomic status, racial and ethnic groups, social networks and support, and social isolation. She is interested in how public and private sector policies—social, economic and health—impact population health, with a special focus on labor policies and work place organizational practices, including the health effects of work-family demands, as well as public and private sector policies related to work flexibility among low-wage workers.
Dr. Bray, the Jefferson-Pilot Excellence Professor of Economics in the Bryan School of Business and Economics at UNC Greensboro, focuses the economics of substance abuse and mental health, and the economic evaluation of substance abuse treatment and prevention. He examines the labor market effects of substance use, abuse, and dependence and the impact of alcohol use/abuse on educational attainment, wages, and labor supply decisions. In his research on the cost-effectiveness of substance abuse treatment and prevention, Dr. Bray has estimated the costs and effectiveness of employee assistance program (EAP) services, screening and brief intervention programs, behavioral and pharmacological therapies for alcohol dependence, and workplace prevention and early intervention programs.
Dr. Buxton, the Elizabeth Fenton Susman Professor of Biobehavioral Health and the director of the Sleep, Health & Society Collaboratory at Pennsylvania State University, focuses primarily on the causes of chronic sleep deficiency in the workplace, home, and society, the health consequences of chronic sleep deficiency, and the physiologic and social mechanisms by which these outcomes arise. Dr. Buxton serves as the second Editor in Chief for the journal Sleep Health.
Dr. Casper, professor of sociology at USC Dornsife, has published extensively in the areas of families and households, work and family, cohabitation, fatherhood, child care, voting, and demographic methods. Previously, she was health scientist administrator and demographer at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) where she built new research programs in work, family, health and well-being and initiated the NICHD Mentored Research Scientist Award in Population Research.
Dr. Chandler, associate professor in the School of Human Development and Family Science in the College of Health at Oregon State University, takes a bioecological and family systems approach to examine the work-family interface. Her research uses longitudinal and daily diary assessments of employees, spouses, and youth to explore how parents’ work experiences spill over to influence the family environment, parenting, and marital and parent–child relationships. She is particularly interested in the implications of work schedules for individual and family well-being and how parents’ daily work experiences and recovery from work can cross over to other family members’ psychological well-being and physical health, including salivary cortisol. Because the relationship between work and family spheres is bidirectional, Dr. Chandler also investigates the role of children and spouses in predicting employees’ work experiences.
Dr. Dearing, the Brandt Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University, studies the diffusion of innovations, including the adoption and implementation of new evidence-based practices, programs, technologies and policies. His research and teaching spans dissemination science, implementation science, program sustainability, and the psychological and sociological basis of the diffusion process. He works with research and practice improvement teams in environmental remediation, nursing care, water conservation, injury and fatality prevention, public health, and healthcare.
Dr. Durham, senior investigator emeritus, Center for Health Research, Kaiser Permanente, served as director of the Center for Health Research and vice president of research for Kaiser Permanente from 1995 to 2016. She conducted her own research on workplace health and translational research and designed and conducted many studies with employers as research partners. She served as Commissioner for the State of Oregon’s Senate Commission for Health Care Access and Affordability and as a medical sociologist whose work focused on the health care of people with chronic, disabling conditions, especially those with severe mental disorders.
Dr. Hammer, professor at Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences; director at Oregon Healthy Workforce Center, Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences; and professor emerita at Portland State University, specializes in the effects of workplace conditions, including supportive supervision at work and occupational stress, on workplace mental health and well-being. She has extensive experience in designing, implementing, and evaluating worksite supervisor training programs to improve employee mental health and well-being outcomes. Dr. Hammer conducts applied research that focuses on workplace interventions aimed at improving supervisor leadership skills and in turn, evaluating the impact of such trainings on both supervisor and worker mental and physical health, safety, and well-being.
Dr. Hanson, associate professor at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, is an industrial/organizational psychologist by training, and a distinguished scholar in biostatistics and research methods whose sustained research academic contributions in workforce safety and well-being have led to a deeper understanding of how to reduce health risks that originate in the workplace. Her work focuses on advanced statistical methods, occupation health psychology, work-life integration, and workplace violence.
Dr. Karuntzos, research psychologist and HHS strategic account executive for RTI’s Social, Statistical, and Environmental Sciences (SSES) Group, works closely with RTI client agency teams, corporate strategy, and research teams to develop plans for entering new markets, establishing key business relationships with partners and funders, and identifying and managing an annual proposal pipeline of more than $200m. She also supports research proposals and capture teams as a subject expert and scientific reviewer, and works closely with key staff and leaders to ensure efficient and effective business development practices, including opportunity development, client engagement and quality management.
Dr. Kelly, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies at MIT Sloan School of Management, and co-director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research, investigates the implications of workplace policies and management practices for firms, workers, and families with a joint focus on equity, well-being, and organizational performance. Her research has examined scheduling and work-family supports, family leaves, and harassment policies in a variety of organizations and industries. Her book with Phyllis Moen, “Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do About It,” received the 2021 Max Weber Award from the American Sociological Association’s Organizations, Occupations, and Work section, an honorable mention for the 2021 Viviana Zelizer Award for best book in economic sociology, and was named as one of Business Insider’s 10 Books to Read to Learn about the Future of Work.
Dr. King, Health Scientist Administrator in the Population Dynamics Branch (PDB) in the Division of Extramural Research at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), is primarily interested in the areas of fertility and infertility, adolescent physical and social development, and the transition to adulthood in developed countries. She directs portfolios of research grants on life course health; biopsychosocial research; and fertility, infertility, kinship, & adoption, and also manages the Population Dynamics Scientist Development Award (K01) program. She has published on methodological approaches for measuring infertility with population-level data, the use of infertility services and assisted reproductive technologies in the United States, and the effects of a work-family intervention on adolescent and adult health.
Dr Klein, previously a professor of biobehavioral health at Pennsylvania State University and director of The Biobehavioral Health Studies Laboratory at Penn State College of Health and Human Development, investigates the biobehavioral effects of stress on addictive behaviors including cigarette smoking and opioid abuse. Specifically, she examines human and animal subjects in laboratory settings using a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates neuroendocrine, immunological, behavioral (e.g., drug use, eating), and psychological variables to evaluate sex differences biobehavioral responses to stress.
Dr. Kossek, Basil S. Turner Professor at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management and the first elected President of the Work-Family Researchers Network, is a leading U.S. social scientist and thought leader on the future of work. She is a global authority on work-family policies, women in STEM, flexible, remote, and hybrid work, job equality, and strategic employment issues. Invited to speak to managers and scholars about work-life, gender and well-being issues in over fifteen countries, she works globally to advance understanding of gender equality and work-family well-being. In 2025-2026, she has been awarded a fellowship to be the VMWare Women’s Leadership Lab CASBS Fellow in residence at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Dr. McHale, Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State University, investigates family systems dynamics– including youth’s and parents’ family roles, relationships, and daily activities– and how these are linked to family members’ psychological and physical health and development. She has three broad lines of research: sibling relationships and their role in the larger family system; family gender dynamics and their link to differences in children psychological and physical health; and the socio-cultural contexts of family dynamics. More generally, grounded in an ecological developmental perspective, her research highlights the everyday experiences of youth and their families using daily diary methods to capture family members’ time use and its correlates along with more typical, interview and survey methods.
Dr. Moen, Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota and at Cornell University, is a McKnight Endowed Presidential Chair and was Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her work focuses on the human meanings of social change in the form of innovations in paid work transforming (gendered) career and life course pathways. This includes the effects of both organizational and technological shifts and macro-level historical forces, such as the aging of the workforce and COVID-19, affected employees’ stress, well-being and health at all life stages. Dr. Moen has published numerous books and articles on occupational careers, retirement, families, health, gender, and social policy, as they intersect and as they play out over the life course.
Dr. Nielsen, Division of Behavioral and Social Research (BSR) director at the National Institute on Aging’s (NIA), has a long history of leadership in the behavioral and social sciences at National Institutes of Health (NIH), having served for 15 years as a program director and branch chief of the NIA BSR Individual Behavioral Processes Branch. Throughout her research career, Dr. Nielsen has built bridges linking psychological and behavioral science to economics, genetics, neuroscience, biology, epidemiology, social science, and biomedicine, at all levels from basic to translational research. She was also instrumental in launching new areas of research in subjective well-being and the social, affective, and economic neurosciences of aging. Her scientific interests and research extend to the study of emotional function in aging, including age differences and age-related changes in the conscious experience of emotion, its physiological and neural correlates, and its functional role in decision making.
Dr. Okechukwu, adjunct associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, is interested in how working conditions and work and family environments interact to shape the health and cancer prevention behaviors of disadvantaged populations. Her primary focus is on working class and immigrant communities with an emphasis on women who earn low wages, and is also interested in understanding how these communities balance work, family and health for themselves and their family members. Dr. Okechukwu is a transformative leader in health equity and community health with over two decades of experience bridging research, public health, health care, and technology. She is renowned for her ability to unite diverse viewpoints and forge strategic partnerships across sectors, creating impactful, sustainable solutions for underserved populations.
Dr. Olson, occupational health psychologist and professor of occupational and environmental health at the University of Utah, has a research program specializing in occupational fatality surveillance and prevention, and safety, health, and well-being interventions for isolated (lone) workers in demanding occupations. He has made many contributions to science, including effective Total Worker Health® interventions for isolated populations; behavioral self-monitoring applied to workplace behavior change and transfer of training; self-assessment of ergonomic and safety exposures; and environmental and social motivational variables. Dr. Olson’s ongoing research projects focus on supporting the health and job success of new bus operators, and on an intervention to prevent injuries and improve the lives of home care workers living with chronic pain. His projects in development focus on the health impacts of schedule and sleep regularity among shift workers, and on integrating environmental and occupational health interventions.