Jessica de Bloom appointed as Aletta Jacobs Professor in Human Resource Management, Occupational Health and Wellbeing

The Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) is pleased to announce that Jessica de Bloom has been appointed as Aletta Jacobs Professor in Human Resource Management, Occupational Health and Wellbeing. The chair is situated within the department of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior (HRM & OB).

Jessica de Bloom joined FEB as a Rosalind Franklin Fellow in 2017. Till September 2022, she combined her position at FEB with a position as Academy of Finland Researcher at Tampere University (Finland). De Bloom started as a post-doctoral researcher at Tampere University’s School of Social Sciences & Humanities and went on to become a Research Fellow at Tampere University’s Institute for Advanced Social Research. Prior to her positions in Finland, she obtained her PhD at the Radboud University Nijmegen in 2012.

Employee well-being and performance

De Bloom is an experienced researcher with significant output. In a short period of time, she has carried out many research projects and published in wide variety of international scientific journals, such as the Journal of Applied Psychology and the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. Her research focuses on the vanishing boundaries between work- and non-work life as one aspect of today´s rapidly changing working conditions. De Bloom investigates the impact of these changes on employee well-being and performance as well as the role of modern information and communication technology.

As Aletta Jacobs Professor in Human Resource Management, Occupational Health and Wellbeing, De Bloom will take a leading role in strengthening the research program of the HRM & OB department and FEB as a whole. She will not only take a leading role in setting up, coordinating and carrying out research in the field of HRM & OB, but will also supervise PhD’s related to occupational health and well-being. Furthermore, De Bloom will be closely involved in developing and coordinating educational programs and will teach courses in the area of HRM & OB. De Bloom: “My aim is to generate knowledge to understand topical societal phenomena and to bridge the scientist-practitioner gap by communicating scientific knowledge to a wide audience of scientists from various disciplines, professionals working in the field, students, and society as a whole.”

Aletta Jacobs Chairs

In 2020, the University of Groningen created an incentive fund to set up fifteen new chairs, which were assigned exclusively to female academics. The chairs are named after the figurehead of the UG: Aletta Jacobs. The fifteen Aletta Jacobs chairs are divided between all eleven faculties. The incentive fund enables the faculties to convert existing Associate Professor posts into Full Professor posts.