The Senate’s annual Distinguished Faculty Awards recognize faculty members for exceptional work promoting OHSU’s mission. Last week, Dr. Leslie Hammer was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Award in the “Affiliated Units: Outstanding Research Award” category. Dr. Hammer is a Professor in the Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences at OHSU and has a secondary appointment in the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health.
Dr. Hammer is an internationally renowned educator and researcher in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and Occupational Health Psychology. She specializes in the mental and physical health effects of supportive supervision at work and the mental and physical health consequences of occupational stress and work-family conflict with extensive experience in designing, implementing and evaluating worksite interventions and supervisor training. She has also been a faculty member at Portland State University for 31 years where she served as Director of the Occupational Health Psychology program funded by NIOSH for 18 years. 
Throughout her career, Dr. Hammer has published over 108 peer-reviewed publications and received over $28M in grant funding. She has extensive international collaborations, awards, and public policy impacts of her research. A recent example of this last point is evidenced by being one of only six researchers invited to present to the U.S. Surgeon General as part of a roundtable on workplace mental health, about which she is developing a public health advisory.
Across the last 7 years at OHSU, Dr. Hammer has brought in close to $13M in external funding funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and Department of Defense (DoD). These grants fund randomized controlled trials of workplace interventions, often evaluating the effectiveness of supervisor support training on employee well-being. Importantly, since joining OHSU, Dr. Hammer has become Co-Director and Co-Principal Investigator of Oregon Healthy Workforce Center, a NIOSH Centers of Excellence for Total Worker Health®.
While Dr. Hammer’s research has been prolific since joining OHSU, she has also taken this to the next level by widely disseminating her work, not only to academic audiences but also by implementing interventions to improve health in numerous workforces. These interventions have been performed in industries including grocery/retail, healthcare, information technology, construction, municipalities and the military.
Dr. Hammer is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the European Academy of Occupational Health Psychology. In 2020, Dr. Hammer received the International Work and Family Researchers Network Generative Researcher Award. In 2019 she received the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology-Practitioner Presidential Recognition.
Dr. Hammer is an energetic and compassionate colleague who is contributing to industries and workplaces nationally and internationally, as well as improving OHSU beyond her specific research program. For example, she was the first in our Institute to design a charter for anti-racism and other forms of discrimination across her research arena and regularly engages with her laboratory members in this activity (other laboratories in the Institute have followed suit). Dr. Hammer is also on the OHSU COVID Wellness Task Force that designed and conducted surveys to examine work experiences and wellbeing, which were provided in six languages as an effort to reach every member of the OHSU workforce.
Dr. Hammer was nominated by the Institute’s faculty members. Congratulations to Dr. Hammer and this year’s award finalists and award winners!
Learn more about Dr. Hammer’s research:
- Dr. Hammer’s Lab page
- Center for Supportive Leadership
- Awarded grant to create military leader training
- Supportive managers are the key to employee well-being
- How managers can help their employees in times of crisis, according to OHSU researchers (The Oregonian/The Conversation)
- Honored at Work-Family Researchers Network Conference
