Brian Welle, Director of People Analytics at Google, firmly believes that an in-depth understanding of human behavior + carefully-crafted experiments + strong measurement and analytics = effective people practices. Fortunately, his role at Google allows Brian and his team to run that equation (in R, of course) to strengthen Google's people practices while helping make Google a great place to work.

For more than a decade, Brian and his team of social scientists have conducted research on employee sentiment, leadership, collaboration, productivity, and well-being while partnering with colleagues across People Operations to translate insight into action. Highlights include creating a social-science incubator called the PiLab, launching a longitudinal study of how careers develop and can be optimized over time (the gDNA survey is in its fifth year), and creating a science-based unconscious bias workshop to enable Googlers to make better, bias-free decisions. 

Prior to Google, Brian was a research director at Catalyst and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from New York University.