Professor Winefield is an Emeritus Professor and former Director of the Centre for Applied Psychological Research at the University of South Australia. He worked for many years at the University of Adelaide before joining the University of South Australia in 1999 as Foundation Professor of Psychology. He has published work on the psychology of unemployment, organisational stress, and learned helplessness.
From 1980-1989 he directed a 10-year longitudinal investigation of youth unemployment. In 1993 he was made a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society. In 2003 he received the Elton Mayo Award from the Australian Psychological Society’s College of Organisational Psychologists for “Outstanding contributions to Industrial/ Organisational Psychology Research and Teaching”.