Professor Katia Levecque
Organisation
Ghent University
Job Title
Professor of Industrial Relations/ Manager ECOOM UGhent – HR in Research
Katia Levecque is Assistant Professor of Industrial Relations at the Department of Personnel Management, Work and Organizational Psychology of Ghent University. Her main interests are occupational health and well-being, work organization and employment conditions, industrial relations, labor markets and welfare states. Trained as a social worker and sociologist and working in the Faculty of Psychology, she prefers an interdisciplinary approach that uses a multilevel, cross-national comparative perspective. She has published in top tier scientific journals within the field of sociology, social psychiatry, clinical psychology and epidemiology. In her work, special focus is on themes such as social inequality and diversity (gender, ethnicity, age, disability).
As Promotor of the Centre for Research and Development Monitoring (ECOOM), an interuniversity center of expertise for the Flemish Government, she manages the UGhent Unit on HR in Research. While the other ECOOM partners address the product of innovation – publication, patents, artistic production – ECOOM UGhent focuses on the individuals and teams that make innovation happen. Research topics are well-being and performance during the production of PhDs, possible barriers and keys to success, mobility of researchers and careers of PhD holders, both within and outside university.
Most recent work includes the study on the work organization and mental health problems of PGRs in Flemish universities, benchmarking the prevalence of the problems to that of other highly educated groups. The study was published in Research Policy in March 2017 and has triggered a lot of attention worldwide, both on scientific fora (see e.g. Nature, Science, Times Higher Education) and on traditional and social media. Four months after its publication, the Altmetrics Attention Score for the paper shows it to be #25 of more than 8,3 million research outputs, indicating that the topic of mental health in academia is an important one to put on the research and policy agenda.
