Image: Professor Sharon Parker
CEPAR Chief Investigator Professor Sharon Parker has been recognised as one of Australia’s top 40 lifetime achievers in research, chosen for the consistent excellence of their work and the impact they had in their fields, by The Australian’s 2021 Research Special Report. Professor Parker is one of Australia’s top five lifetime achievers in the research discipline ‘Business, Economics & Management’.
Sharon Parker is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellow, John Curtin Distinguished Professor, and the Director of the Centre for Transformative Work Design within the Future of Work Institute at Curtin University. She is a CEPAR Director of Mentoring (Mid-Career Researchers) and the Stream Leader of CEPAR’s research stream Organisations and the Mature Workforce.
Her research focuses particularly on job and work design, as well as other topics such as proactivity, mental health and job performance. She has attracted competitive research funding worth over $40,000,000, has published over 150 academic articles, and her research has been cited more than 26,000 times internationally.
Professor Sharon Parker has also been recognised as one of the world’s most influential scientists and social scientists in the 2019 Highly Cited Researchers list released by the Web of Science Group, as well as PLOS Biology’s 2020 World's Top 2% Scientists.
Her mentoring expertise has been recognised with her receiving the ARC’s Kathleen Fitzpatrick Award and the US Academy of Management OB Division Mentoring Award. She established the highly successful Women in Research initiative to support academic women.
She helped to develop the Good Work Design principles being used by Safe Work Australia and Comcare to foster the improved quality of work within Australian organisations, and is a co-founder of the Thrive at Work initiative, designed to improve mental health at work.
Professor Parker is a former Associate Editor for the Academy of Management Annals and the Journal of Applied Psychology, and has served on numerous editorial boards. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences; and a Fellow of the US Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology.