About Me

My name is Brent Reed and I’m an organizational researcher and educator.

My journey to this field was shaped by a previous career in health care. Originally trained as a pharmacist, I spent nearly a decade working alongside an interdisciplinary team of health professionals, caring for patients with heart failure.

The turning point for me came as I witnessed so many of my peers experiencing burnout—an overwhelming sense of exhaustion and disillusionment toward the work they had dedicated their lives to. Many left their jobs, and some even exited the field entirely. These observations led me to pursue a master’s degree in industrial-organizational psychology, where I learned that health professionals were not alone in these experiences. This sparked a new set of questions, such as why are so many people feeling this way and what can we do to address it? How much of it is driven by our tendency to see work as a core part of our identity?

Driven by a desire to explore these questions, I returned to school in the fall of 2021 and graduated with a Ph.D. in Organizational Science. I will be returning to academia as an Assistant Professor of Psychological and Organizational Science at the University of North Carolina Charlotte in Fall 2025.

For more information about my background, please see my CV, or explore my research or teaching experiences.