Professor Ellen Ernst Kossek is an award-winning U.S. social scientist who helped advance the U.S. and international work-family and work-life research policy fields.
Her research examines leadership development and strategic initiatives to advance gender equality, work-family-life inclusion, and implementation of flexibility policies and remote work to support work-life boundary styles as a growing form of workforce diversity. She is the Basil S. Turner Distinguished Professor at Purdue University's Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business and holds a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Yale University, an MBA for the University of Michigan and a Bachelors’ degree with honors in psychology from Mount Holyoke College.
Ellen is the first elected President of the Work-Family Researchers Network. She is elected a Fellow in the Academy of Management and the American Psychological Association and the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. She is serving as an expert on the U.S . National Academies of Sciences Committee on Family Policies to support Caregivers working in STEM in the U.S. She was elected to the Board of Governors and Chair of the Gender and Diversity in Organizations Division of the Academy of Management.
She has been appointed a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University a visiting scholar at the University of Bologna; Queen Mary University of London and Kings College, in the U.K; UNISA in Australia, and served on IESE’s work-family and women’s leadership advisory board in Barcelona, Spain.
Ellen has worked for major corporations in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. She has been invited to speak in many countries about work-life-family and gender equality employment policies/practices in the 24-7 world. Her research has been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control, the National Science Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan, Russell Sage, and Gerber Foundations. She is a published author of several books including Creating Gender-Inclusive Organizations: Lessons from Research and Practice and CEO of Me: Creating a Life that Works in the Flexible Job Age, which has been translated into several languages. She is married with 4 children and a dog named Max.
Published in Top Academic Journals and National Media Outlets
News Public Radio / CNN / Harvard Business Review / The Wall Street Journal / Time / Psychology Today / The Economist / Financial Times
Awards & Recognition
Elected Fellow Academy of Management
Limited to 1% of over 20,000 members from over 120 countries
Elected Fellow American Psychological Association and Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology
Ellen Galinsky Work Family Generative Researcher Award
This award recognizes a work-family researcher or research team who have/has contributed break-through thinking to the work-family field via theory, measures, and/or data sets that led to expansive application, innovation, and diffusion, including the sharing of research opportunity in the spirit of open science.
Selected for a Fulbright Award Grant to the United Kingdom
Estimated to occur in 2021 due to pandemic.
Top Ten Extraordinary Contributor to Work Family Research Award for Work Family Research Network
Overall reputation | Publishing (academic metrics) | Publishing (reputation among scholars) | Mentoring future work family scholars | Dissemination of work-family research (translational) | Service to the work and family field | Landmark work and family contributions
Work-Life Legacy award
Winner for helping to build and advance the work-family field.