Researching Cary Cooper

Before moving to Manchester he was Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University. Cooper was Head of the Manchester School of Management (within UMIST) from the early 1980s. In 1995 he became Pro-Vice-Chancellor and then Deputy Vice-Chancellor of UMIST until 2002. From 1979 to 1980 he was chairman of the Management Education and Development Division of the Academy of Management and was elected as Founding President of the British Academy of Management. In June 2005 he was appointed head of the Sunningdale Institute, which, managed by the United Kingdom National School of Government, brings international academics and industry figures together to advise on issues facing UK public sector organisations. He was Chair of the Academy of Social Sciences, a body representing over 88,000 social scientists and 46 learned societies in the social sciences (including the Royal Geographical Society, British Psychological Society, the Political Studies Association, and the Royal Statistical Society). In 2010 he was Chair of the Chronic Diseases and Mental Health Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum. He is immediate past President of Relate, Clinical Advisor to Anxiety UK, President of the Institute of Welfare, President of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development 2016-, Co-Chair of the National Forum for Health & Wellbeing at Work (2016-) and past President of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. Cooper is also a director of well-being specialists and business psychologists at Robertson Cooper Limited, a university spin off company which he set up in 1999 with Ivan Robertson. He was the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Organizational Behavior.

Cooper's parents were Jews from Romania and Ukraine who settled in West Hollywood. He became a British citizen in 1993.