Nick Baylis

Why organisations work with Nick Baylis

• He brings the academic spine of well-being science into the room. Co-editor of The Science of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2005) and co-convenor of the Royal Society’s first conference on the topic, alongside Daniel Kahneman and Sir Harry Kroto.
• He was the UK’s first Lecturer in Positive Psychology, teaching the subject at Cambridge for eight years before the wellness industry existed in its current form. That sequencing matters when a workforce has heard every claim before.
• His writing has reached a public audience without losing its evidence base: 100 Dr FeelGood columns for The Times, The Rough Guide to Happiness for Penguin, and the trade volume Learning from Wonderful Lives.
• He works comfortably across audiences, from board-level leadership groups to whole-school populations at Wellington College and Rugby School, with the same underlying material translated for the room.
• He treats well-being as a daily skill set, not a feel-good intervention. The frame is performance and resilience grounded in research, which lands with sceptical commercial audiences.

Biography highlights

• PhD from Jesus College, University of Cambridge, 1999.
• The UK’s first Lecturer in Positive Psychology and the Science of Well-Being, Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, University of Cambridge, 2001 to 2008.
• Co-editor of The Science of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2005) with Felicia Huppert and Barry Keverne.
• Co-convenor of the Royal Society of London’s first three-day conference on the Science of Well-Being.
• Author of The Rough Guide to Happiness (Rough Guides / Penguin) and Learning from Wonderful Lives (Cambridge Well-being Books, 2005).
• Wrote 100 weekly Dr FeelGood columns on the science of happiness for The Times, syndicated by The Australian.
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; Associate of the Royal Society of Medicine; Chartered Psychologist.

Biography

The science of human well-being is a young field, and most of what shows up in corporate wellness programmes was research before it was product. Nick Baylis is one of a small group of academics who shaped the underlying evidence base and then took the trouble to translate it for a non-academic audience. He earned his PhD at Jesus College, Cambridge in 1999, and in 2001 became the UK’s first Lecturer in Positive Psychology and the Science of Well-Being.

Over eight years lecturing at Cambridge, he helped build the academic infrastructure for the field. He co-convened the Royal Society of London’s first conference on the Science of Well-Being, and co-edited the resulting volume for Oxford University Press in 2005, alongside Felicia Huppert and Barry Keverne, with Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Sir Harry Kroto involved in the convening. The book remains a standard reference for the discipline.

Outside the academy, his work has reached a public readership without losing the evidence base. He wrote 100 weekly Dr FeelGood columns for The Times, syndicated by The Australian, and authored The Rough Guide to Happiness for Penguin and Learning from Wonderful Lives, the latter built on extended interviews with figures including Kate Adie, Gary Lineker, Jamie Oliver, and Martha Lane Fox.

His client work spans corporate leadership groups, healthcare organisations, and senior schools, including extended programmes with Wellington College and Rugby School. The throughline is unchanged across audiences: well-being treated as a daily set of skills with a research foundation, not a poster campaign.

Key speaking topics

• The science of well-being in the workplace
• Resilience and sustained performance under pressure
• Positive psychology applied to organisational life
• Mental health and the working environment
• Well-being and leadership effectiveness
• Building well-being capability across schools and educational institutions
• The everyday skills of psychological flourishing

Ideal for

• CHROs and people directors rebuilding the substance behind a well-being strategy
• Senior leadership teams working through periods of fatigue, change, or sustained pressure
• Heads of school and trustees designing whole-institution well-being programmes
• Healthcare and professional services organisations facing chronic workforce stress

Audience outcomes

• A working understanding of what well-being research actually supports, separated from wellness-industry claims
• A small set of daily psychological skills that hold up under workplace pressure
• A sharper view of how leadership behaviour shapes the well-being of a team
• Confidence to interrogate well-being investments and ask better questions of providers
• Language for talking about resilience and mental health that does not sound borrowed from a brochure