The Ellen Galinsky 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.
Honoring Ellen Galinsky
Ellen Galinsky is the Chief Science Officer/Executive Director of Mind in the Making at the Bezos Family Foundation and a senior research advisor for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). She remains president of Families and Work Institute and is the author of over 100 books/reports and 300 articles.
While on the faculty of Bank Street College in the 1970s, Galinsky researched/co-authored a book about exemplary child care, founded The Family Center at Bank Street, and conducted studies on interventions to improve the quality of childcare. In the 1980s, she wrote the Six Stages of Parenthood and led studies on parent-professional relationships.
Seeing how important work-life issues are, she helped establish the work-life field in the 1980s, co-founding Families and Work Institute in 1989. Since then, she has directed/co-directed the most comprehensive ongoing studies of the U.S. workforce/workplace as well as an award program, When Work Works, now in all 50 states. In December 2016, these programs became a part of SHRM, which will release nine new reports in 2018-2019.
In 2000, Ellen Galinsky became concerned that far too many young people were dropping out of learning. The resulting research journey led to her book, Mind in the Making. In March 2016, Mind in the Making became a program of the Bezos Family Foundation. It has developed many materials, including Learning Modules now in 20 states/communities and in Head Start.
Award Recipients
2026 Award Recipients: Sarah Flood, Melissa Milkie and Liana Sayer
The 2026 Ellen Galinsky Generative Researcher Award is awarded to Sarah Flood, Melissa Milkie, and Liana Sayer for their development, support, and use of time use data. Their collaborations exemplify the impact of their work. Drs. Flood and Sayer co-led IPUMS Time Use for over a decade, securing NIH and NSF funding to maintain and expand it as well as to fund the 2021 Well-Being Module of the American Time Use Survey. They also hosted several WFRN workshops on time use data. Drs. Milkie and Sayer are longtime research collaborators, with over 5,000 citations on just three co-authored articles examining women’s and men’s housework and childcare, including the most cited article published in any ASA journal in 2025. These three remarkably generative scholars are currently working on a new project on the meanings of time in various activities across gender and other social groups, examining changes in parents’ time allocation and well-being from 2010 to 2021.
Dr. Sarah Flood is a fierce advocate for public data to advance science. She has developed deep expertise with the American Time Use Survey and pushed the boundaries of its use through research on work, family, and gender across the life course. Through workshops, webinars, and individual consultations she has helped demystify the use of traditionally complex time diary data and supported the use of these data by many scholars.
Dr. Melissa Milkie, former WFRN President, is co-author of the award-winning book Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, based on decades of time-diary data. Her research is distinctive in combining time-diary measures with subjective perceptions of time, including felt versus actual time with children, time deficits, and meanings attached to time in daily activities and with family members. Her work examining cultural expectations and structural conditions that shape both time allocation and experience has included U.S., Canadian and European contexts.
Dr. Liana Sayer focuses research on historical and cross-national determinants, patterns, and consequences of gender and social class inequalities in time use over the life course. This work documents gender convergence in household and care work across Western and East Asian Industrialized states resulting mostly from women shifting time to socially valued activities like paid work. It also reveals substantial variation in gender gaps in household work across institutional and cultural contexts, despite similarity in demographic and normative trends