2020 Award Recipient: Phyllis Moen
Phyllis Moen holds a McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair and is Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota. Prior to this, Dr. Moen was the Ferris Family Professor of Life Course Studies at Cornell University. She earned her doctorate at the University of Minnesota. She is the recipient of numerous awards and has generated over $20 million of research funding for her studies of working families and organizations.
Her nominators (Erin Kelly, Wen Fan and Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth) provided a rich summary of Dr. Moen’s research, far too lengthy to publish here. A few highlights (quoted from her nomination) help illuminate the impact she has had on understandings of family dynamics, organizational practices, and social policy.
Phyllis excels – and indeed is downright amazing – with regard to the volume of her contributions, the impact of her contributions to work-family scholarship and beyond, and her enduring commitment to the work-family community….. She has published over 200 articles or chapters, has been cited over 23,000 times, and has an h-index of 75 and an i10-index of 197. Furthermore, she published 10 books covering the topics of workplace policies and practices to address overload and the work-life interface, retirement and working for pay and in the community in later life, couples’ negotiations of their work and family responsibilities over the life course, the institutional and historical contexts that affect work-family strategies and decisions, and more. All of these figures and numerical rankings are impressive but those who have interacted with Phyllis Moen know she is not only concerned with getting more publications or citations; her primary goal is fostering a vigorous and welcoming intellectual community of work-family scholars. She is a habitual “institution builder.” She has repeatedly created fun and fulfilling projects and centers that involve junior scholars (from undergraduate students through junior faculty) and train future generations of work-family scholars and practitioners. She’s also a master of pulling seasoned scholars into the field, helping them see that whether they identify as scholars of unemployment, social policy, demography, stress and health, or aging, there are exciting ways that they can both learn from and contribute to the work-family community.