Sustainable academic

Sustainable Academic is an approach developed by Natalie Sabik to address academic culture and the way it reinforces unsustainable work-life balance. While on the tenure track, Dr. Sabik got the message, “things don’t really change when you get tenure.” If things weren’t going to change with tenure, she felt an imperative to make them sustainable now. What followed was a quest to dig into all of the resources around health, psychological well-being, productivity, academia, professional success, business, and happiness that offer insight and tools to help manage an academic job and improve quality of life for herself and for others.

Dr. Sabik

Dr. Sabik is a feminist psychologist whose work focuses on stress, self perceptions, gender roles, health, and psychological well-being. She has a dual PhD in personality psychology and women’s studies from the University of Michigan, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Brandeis University funded by the National Institute on Aging, and she studied the physiological and psychological mechanisms associated with stress. She joined the faculty at the University of Rhode Island in 2014, and since then has published interdisciplinary work spanning the fields of Public Health, Psychology, and Gender Studies. She was twice named a fellow of the Institute for Academic Feminist Psychology through Division 35 of The American Psychological Association, and her teaching, research, and service to the profession have been recognized by the American Psychological Association (Division 35), the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the American Public Health Association.

Dr. Sabik's work is motivated by exploring how people internalize social and cultural values, and how these in turn affect self perceptions, health, and well-being. In addition, her work focuses on how social interactions reinforce cultural messages and affect well-being.

While on the tenure track, she became very invested in figuring out how to strike an appropriate work life balance that left room for professional success as well as time for rest, family, meaningful personal relationships, hobbies, and enjoying life. The more she dug into this topic the more she realized that the implicit and explicit values of academia are at odds with this approach, and it is up to each individual to figure out how to create and maintain this balance. Ultimately, Dr. Sabik is working to improve policies that support faculty, postdocs, and graduate students in all aspects of life and respect the diversity of people’s needs. In the meantime, she has worked to develop resources and identify skill sets that individuals can develop to help take a stand in claiming their own work-life balance.