Christina Maslach

Education and career

Maslach graduated from Berkeley High School (California) (1963), Radcliffe College (1967) and earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford University (1971). After receiving her Ph.D., Maslach joined the psychology department at Berkeley as an assistant professor.

Her critique of the Stanford prison experiment persuaded investigator Philip Zimbardo (later her husband) to stop the experiment after only six days. The experience also shaped Maslach's later career, particularly her interest in occupational burnout as a response to unavoidable stress. Maslach and Zimbardo married in 1972, a year after the study.

In 1981, Maslach and Susan E. Jackson authored the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) to assess an individual's experience of occupational burnout in human services settings. She later developed alternative versions of the original MBI to be used to assess education settings (1986) and general occupational settings (1996). More than 30 years later, in 2014, the Maslach Burnout Inventory was still being cited as "the mainstream measure for burnout".

From 1988 to 1989, she was president of the Western Psychological Association (WPA). Since 2001, she has been vice provost for undergraduate education at the University of California, Berkeley.