Profile
Dr. Ann Bookman is a Visiting Scholar in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. She is a social anthropologist who has authored a number of publications in the areas of aging, family caregiving for elders, work and family issues, community organizations, and public policy. She is the lead author of the Family Caregiver Handbook: Finding Elder Care Resources in Massachusetts (MIT, 2007). Her book, Starting in Our Own Backyards: How working families can build community and survive the new economy (Routledge, 2004), is an ethnography of 40 working families that extends the discourse on work-family balance to include issues of community involvement and civil society.
Dr. Bookman served as Executive Director of the MIT Workplace Center at the Sloan School of Management at MIT from 2001-2008. At the center she led research projects on redesigning our workplaces – with a focus on the healthcare workplace – so that employees can manage their work lives, care for their families, and contribute to their communities. She has held a teaching, research, and administrative positions at Radcliffe College, Wellesley College and the College of the Holy Cross. She has also worked in government as a presidential appointee during the first term of the Clinton administration, serving as Policy and Research Director of the Women's Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor, and as Executive Director of the bipartisan Commission on Family and Medical Leave. She was the principal author of the Commission’s report to Congress, A Workable Balance (U.S. Department of Labor, 1996).
Degrees
Harvard University
Ph.D.
Harvard University
M.A.
Barnard College
B.A.