Samantha Brady and Sheng-Hung Lee Awarded PhDs
by Niels Wu
AgeLab researchers Samantha Brady and Sheng-Hung Lee earned PhDs this April after successfully defending their dissertations.
Brady’s PhD was awarded by Brown University’s Department of Sociology. Her dissertation is titled “Zoomed Out: How Employer and Employee Experiences and Attitudes Toward Telework Influence the Professional Workforce” and explores how employers and employees conceive of and experience telework arrangements after the COVID-19 pandemic. Leveraging data from two surveys, her findings show that how telework opportunities are allocated and treated within an organization depends on the organizational context of the workplace, characteristics and experiences of managers, and the characteristics and family situation of employees seeking telework options. Samantha also explored how organizations can support teleworkers by improving their perceptions of isolation and loneliness while working outside of the office. She found that elements of organizational culture and supervisor support improve teleworkers’ feelings of isolation and loneliness, ultimately improving employee satisfaction and retention. Brady’s work has significant implications for employers aiming to navigate and support telework arrangements in the post-pandemic labor market.
Lee’s PhD in Human Behavior and Service Design was administered by the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. His dissertation, “Design for Longevity: Service and System Innovation,” explores how design can support a world where people live longer. Addressing the social, economic, and systemic challenges of an aging population, he introduces Longevity Planning Blocks—tangible tools used to uncover user needs and facilitate collaborative planning. Using a mixed-methods approach, his study proposes a new framework for creating adaptive, inclusive, and sustainable services. It highlights five key paradigm shifts—from age-based to stage-based thinking and from human-centered to humanity-centered design—offering actionable strategies to build a more resilient and socially engaged longevity society.
Congratulations, Dr. Brady and Dr. Lee!
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