Eileen McNeely

Founder & Executive Director, SHINE

Dr. McNeely is Founder and Executive Director of SHINE, the Health & Sustainability Initiative at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. McNeely has extensive experience in the areas of environmental epidemiology, occupational and community health, health promotion, health services management and policy, and clinical practice as a nurse practitioner.   Her experience spans numerous industries. She started and runs the Harvard Flight Attendant Health Study, the largest cohort study of flight attendants. She is a former intern at the Occupational Health and Safety Administration in Washington D.C., evaluating the impact of regulations on the chemical industry. She has consulted both nationally and internationally on the impact of work on wellbeing and has authored many publications on this topic.

Her research is currently focused on work as a platform to improve well-being, putting people and health at the center of corporate sustainability and business culture.  Using a rigorous and applied academic approach she aims to shine a light on worker health and well-being in the business context, and engages companies to understand the impact of workplace culture and practices on well-being. Her research is driven by combining mental, physical and psychosocial well-being metrics with business metrics such as retention, absenteeism, productivity, and performance to guide businesses to better understand the impact of the workplace culture on health.   Eileen’s work with companies aims to redesign how business integrates well-being from an ever-changing programmatic style to an integrated systems approach.