Rate My Professor Peggy Kern

Professor Peggy Kern, also known as Margaret L. Kern, serves as Professor in Wellbeing Science at the Centre for Wellbeing Science within the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Education. She holds a BA in Psychology from Arizona State University with minors in Spanish and Communication, an MS and PhD in social/personality psychology from the University of California, Riverside (completed in 2010), and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. Her career has focused on advancing wellbeing science through interdisciplinary research drawing from health, positive, social, personality, developmental psychology, and public health perspectives.

Professor Kern's research specializes in understanding, measuring, and promoting thriving and wellbeing across the lifespan, with applications in educational and workplace settings. She examines factors such as school belonging, social media language for personality and health insights, the PERMA framework for flourishing, and systems-informed approaches to positive psychology. She has authored or edited three books: Palgrave Handbook of Positive Education (2021, with M. L. Wehmeyer), Boosting School Belonging: Practical Strategies to Help Adolescents Feel Like They Belong at School (2019, with K. A. Allen), and School Belonging in Adolescents: Theory, Research and Practice (2017, with K. A. Allen). Her prolific publication record includes over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, with highly influential works such as 'The PERMA-Profiler: A brief multidimensional measure of flourishing' (Butler & Kern, International Journal of Wellbeing, 2016), 'Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: The open-vocabulary approach' (Schwartz et al., PLOS ONE, 2013), and 'What schools need to know about fostering school belonging: A meta-analysis' (Allen et al., Educational Psychology Review, 2018). These contributions have shaped wellbeing science, positive education, and personality assessment fields, evidenced by thousands of citations and widespread adoption of her developed measures. Professor Kern has delivered invited talks globally and collaborates on initiatives bridging research and practice in schools and organizations.