Dr Laurence Wainwright

About

Dr Laurence Wainwright is Course Director of the MSc in Sustainability, Enterprise and the Environment and a Departmental Lecturer.

A teaching and learning oriented academic, Dr Wainwright has been teaching and researching at universities in Australia, Sweden, the United States, and United Kingdom since 2011. He is passionate about the holistic development of the students he teaches and helping them to develop into well-rounded individuals with a mindset of intellectual curiosity and courage, continuous self-improvement, and service to a mission beyond themselves. He has received several prizes and citations for his teaching, as well as appearing on lists recognising high scores in student feedback surveys.

Dr Wainwright's research interests and teaching areas are multidisciplinary and diverse. They include sustainability and corporate social responsibility; mental health impacts of climate change; strategy, management, leadership; and precision psychiatry, psychopharmacology and drug repurposing.

In addition to his role in the Smith School, Dr Wainwright is a Research Fellow at Green Templeton College, a Skoll Early Career Research Fellow in the Saïd Business School, and a Contributor Researcher and Facilitator in the Department of Psychiatry.

A Member of Smith School Leadership and Management Teams and School of Geography Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee, Dr Wainwright also serves as an external examiner at several leading British universities, is an adjunct reviewer for several journals and has served as a grant reviewer for the Swedish Energy Agency.

In 2022, Dr Wainwright received an Oxford University Excellence Award. Additionally, he was a nominee for the Vice Chancellor’s Staff Sustainability Award.

Dr Wainwright completed his doctoral studies in Business Administration at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. His PhD thesis used the contextual domain of the Swedish fishing industry in order to consider how contests to organizational legitimacy manifest around sustainability debates. Eighteen months of this programme was spent at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business, and an additional six months across multiple universities in China, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands.

Dr Wainwright also holds a Master of Science in Sustainable Development from Uppsala University, a Master of Education from the Queensland University of Technology, and a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education Teaching and Learning, Bachelor of Accounting and Bachelor of Business (Honours) from the University of Technology Sydney.