Barnes receives award for scholarly achievement from Academy of Management

Chris Barnes

Christopher Barnes, an associate professor of management at the University of Washington Foster School of Business, has received the 2020 Cummings Scholarly Achievement Award from the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management.

This prestigious annual award recognizes the extraordinary achievement of one scholar in the early to middle portion of their career.

Barnes is a globally renowned expert on human sustainability. His studies have confirmed a litany of ill effects of sleep deprivation in the workplace.

The Cummings Award committee lauded Barnes for his ability to establish a “strong and unique identity at the intersection of management and sleep health.”

His prolific research—published in top academic journals and cited in the popular press—has made an immediate and meaningful impact on corporate managers and the healthcare field, among many others.

“Although letters such as this one often speak about how someone ‘changed the conversation’ in some literature, in this case Chris is actually the person who started the conversation (on the effects of fatigue in the workplace), and a conversation that was worth having,” wrote John Hollenbeck, the Eli Broad Professor of Management at Michigan State University, in nominating Barnes for the award.

When does he sleep?

A former officer and behavioral scientist in the United State Air Force, Barnes joined the Foster School faculty in 2013. He became an Evert McCabe Endowed Fellow in 2016.

Barnes has been frequently recognized for his research, teaching and mentorship. He received the Foster School’s Faculty Mentor Award in 2018. In 2017, he received the Distinguished Early Career Award from the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) and the Responsible Research in Management Award from IACMR. The Western Academy of Management named him an Ascendant Scholar in 2014. And he’s won or been a finalist for numerous best paper awards in several top journals, which also have named him outstanding reviewer.

Earlier this year, he was elected a SIOP Fellow.

Barnes’ recent TEDx Talk explores the many effects of quality sleep—and the lack thereof—in the workplace.

Since 2007, Barnes has published nearly 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals and achieved more than 4,000 Google Scholar citations. “For anyone, this is an impressive career,” noted the Cummings Award committee. “For someone who graduated with his PhD in 2009, it is an extraordinary record.”

Barnes also serves on the editorial review boards of four A-list academic journals: Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Applied Psychology. Earlier this year, he was named to the editorial review board of the journal Sleep Health.

Not just academic

Beyond academia, Barnes’ work has also appeared widely across the popular media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the BBC, Harvard Business Review, Freakonomics, Scientific American and Huffington Post, to name just a few.

His recent TEDx Talk covered the range of his research which, in addition to confirming the impacts of sleep deprivation on employees and managers, also examines the causes of—and solutions to—inadequate sleep.

Last October, he was named “Professor of the Week” by Poets & Quants, the influential business school site, in recognition of his intriguing—not to mention encouraging—2019 Journal of Management study documenting that a healthy sex life at home promotes engagement in the workplace, and vice-versa.

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