Mo Wang - Biography#

Dr. Mo Wang is a University Distinguished Professor and Lanzillotti-McKethan Eminent Scholar Chair at the Warrington College of Business, University of Florida. He also serves as the Department Chair of the Management Department and Director of Human Resource Research Center at the University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology in 2005 from Bowling Green State University, USA. He is THE leading retirement researcher in the world, having generated novel multilevel theories to guide contemporary understanding of retirement process and reconciled past inconsistent findings from different research disciplines. He also made significant contributions to occupational health psychology literature and newcomer socialization literature. In addition, he actively develops quantitative methods to create new tools to address research problems encountered in organizational and psychological research. His research has been reported extensively by the mass media, such as the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, NPR, NYTimes, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, just to name a few.

To date, Dr. Wang has published more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, 36 book chapters, and 6 books. More than 90 of his peer-reviewed articles appeared in the very best psychology (e.g., American Psychologists, Annual Review of Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Methods, and Journal of Applied Psychology) and management journals (e.g., Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, Organizational Research Methods, and Organization Science). The impact of his research is outstanding: (a) he has received over 30,237 citations in Google Scholar with an H-index of 87; (b) 14 of his articles have been cited more than 200 times in Web of Science (fewer than 0.1% of all published articles achieve this level of impact Podsakoff et al., 2008); (c) he has given more than 100 invited keynotes, colloquia, and workshops at major conferences and leading academic institutions in 16 countries; (d) he ranks in the World’s Top 2% Scientists list published by Stanford University and Elsevier at 99.8th percentile in the scientific field of Business and Management.

Dr. Wang’s contribution to the fields of applied psychology and management has earned him national and international recognition. He received numerous awards for his research, including Academy of Management (AOM) HR Division Scholarly Achievement Award (2008), Careers Division Best Paper Award (2009), European Commission’s Erasmus Mundus Scholarship for Work, Organizational, and Personnel Psychology (2009), Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology (SIOP)’s William A. Owens Scholarly Achievement Award (2016), and Journal of Management Scholarly Impact Award (2017). He also received Cummings Mid-Career Scholarly Achievement Award from AOM’s OB Division (2017), Early Career Contribution/Achievement Awards from American Psychological Association (APA; 2013), Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2013), SIOP (2012), AOM’s HR Division (2011) and Research Methods Division (2011), and Society for Occupational Health Psychology (SOHP; 2009). Dr. Wang is an elected Foreign Member of Academia Europaea and a Fellow of AOM, APA, APS, and SIOP.

Dr. Wang’s research is well recognized and regarded by major funding agencies throughout the world. His research program has been supported with more than $6M by National Institute of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Australian Research Council (ARC), and various other research foundations.

He served in three elected roles for major professional societies: President-track for SIOP (2021-2024), President for SOHP (2014-2015), and Member of the APA Publications and Communications Board (2021-2027). He is the founding Editor-in-Chief for Work, Aging and Retirement (2015-present), a reviewing editor for PNAS Nexus (2022-present), and an Associate Editor for Academy of Management Journal (2024-present). He was an Associate Editor for Journal of Applied Psychology (2010-2020). In 2015, he conducted a Congressional Debriefing on retirement for U.S. Congress. He also served as an invited speaker for the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team twice, giving talks on retirement (2015) and older worker job search (2016). He served as the Director for the Science of Organizations Program at NSF (2014-2016) and was appointed as a member (2023-2025) on the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences (BBCSS) of National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.