About Me

My name is Brent Reed and I’m a doctoral candidate in Organizational Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

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 as a full-time doctoral student in the fall of 2021. With a plan to complete my dissertation and graduate next spring, I will be entering the academic job market beginning this summer.

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