Faculty Researchers

Mabel Abraham is the Barbara and Meyer Feldberg Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics.  She teaches the MBA elective course on Power, Influence, and Networks and PhD seminars on Organizational Theory. She earned her PhD and MS in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Professor Abrahamson studies the creation, spread, use and rejection of innovative techniques for managing organizations and their employees. He is best known for his work on fads and fashions in management techniques. He is also an expert on the management of organizational change. He has explored the topic of change management in Change Without Pain: How Managers Can Overcome Initiative Overload, Organizational Chaos, and Employee Burnout (Harvard Business School Press, 2005), which won a Best Book of the Year award from Strategy and Business.

Modupe Akinola is the Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and Faculty Director of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics. Prior to pursuing a career in academia, Professor Akinola worked in professional services at Bain & Company and Merrill Lynch. Professor Akinola examines how organizational environments- characterized by deadlines, multi-tasking, and other attributes such as having low status- can engender stress, and how this stress can have spill-over effects on performance.

Professor Ames's research focuses on social judgment and behavior. He examines how people judge themselves as well as the individuals and groups around them (e.g., impression formation, stereotyping). He also studies the consequences of these judgments on interpersonal dynamics, including prosocial behaviors (e.g., trust, cooperation, helping) and competitive interactions (e.g., negotiations, conflict, aggression). A central aspect of this work is how people "read minds" to make inferences--whether right or wrong--about what others think, want, and feel.

Silvia Bellezza is an Associate Professor of Business in Marketing at Columbia Business School. Her research focuses on status signaling in consumption. Specifically, her work examines traditional status signals (e.g., conventional luxury brands and products) and alternative status signals (e.g., nonconformity, minimalism, vintage).

Within the broader field of organizational behavior, Professor Brockner is well known for his work in several areas, including the effects of organizational downsizing on the productivity and morale of the "survivors," the management of organizational change, organizational justice, self processes in organizations and managerial judgment and decision making. He teaches the MBA elective course Managerial Decision Making, the Ph.D. course Individual and Collective Behavior in Organizations, and he is an active consultant and speaker to companies worldwide.

Melanie Brucks is interested in creativity and innovation. Her research focuses on the processes involved in generating and selecting innovative ideas and on the cognitive and behavioral consequences of technological innovations. Her findings help marketers better design ideation activities to maximize productivity and fuel innovation.

Before joining Columbia, Melanie Brucks received a PhD in Marketing from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Vanessa Burbano is the Sidney Taurel Associate Professor of Management in the strategy area at Columbia Business School.

Bo Cowgill is an Assistant Professor at Columbia Business School, a research affiliate at CESifo, and a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His elective, People Analytics and Strategy, won The Aspen Institute's 2019 Ideas Worth Teaching Award. He was also named to Poets and Quants’ 2020 list of Best 40 Business School Professors Under 40.

Shai Davidai is Assistant Professor in the Management Division of Columbia Business School. His research examines people’s everyday judgments of themselves, other people, and society as a whole. He studies the psychological forces that shape, distort, and bias people’s perceptions of the world and their influence on people’s judgments, preferences, and choices. His topics of expertise include the psychology of judgment and decision making, economic inequality and social mobility, social comparisons, and zero-sum thinking.

Adam Galinsky is the Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at the Columbia Business School.

Professor Galinsky has published more than 300 scientific articles, chapters, and teaching cases in the fields of management and social psychology. His research and teaching focus on leadership, negotiations, diversity, decision-making, and ethics.

Dr. Jorge Guzman is an assistant professor at the Management Division in Columbia Business School. Jorge received his PhD from the Sloan School of Management  at MIT, and was previously a postdoc at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a lecturer at MIT Sloan.

Professor Higgins, the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology and Professor of Business is an expert on motivation and decision making. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is the author of Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works (Oxford) and co-author of Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence (Penguin). He teaches an Executive MBA course on negotiation, and is the Director of the Motivation Science Center. Higgins has received the Donald T.

Paul Ingram is the Kravis Professor of Business at the Columbia Business School.  He has received Columbia’s highest recognition for teaching, the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching, as well as the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence, and thirteen teaching awards voted by graduating students at Columbia and Cornell Universities.  His PhD is from Cornell University, and he was on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University before coming to Columbia.  He has held visiting professorships at Tel Aviv University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Toronto.

Sheena S. Iyengar is the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Division at Columbia Business School, and a world expert on choice and decision-making. Her book The Art of Choosing received the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2010 award, and was ranked #3 on the Amazon.com Best Business and Investing Books of 2010. Her research is regularly cited in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist as well as in popular books, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance. Dr.

Gita V. Johar (PhD NYU 1993; MBA Indian Institute of Management Calcutta 1985) has been on the faculty of Columbia Business School since 1992 and is currently the Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business. She served as the school’s inaugural Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion from 2019 to 2021, Faculty Director of Online Initiatives from 2014 to 2017, Senior Vice Dean from 2011 to 2014, and as the inaugural Vice Dean for Research from 2010 to 2011.

Eric Johnson is a faculty member at the Columbia Business School at Columbia University where he is the inaugural holder of the Norman Eig Chair of Business, and Director of the Center for Decision Sciences. His research examines the interface between Behavioral Decision Research, Economics and the decisions made by consumers, managers, and their implications for public policy, markets and marketing.

Daniel (Dongil) Keum is an Associate Professor of Management at Columbia Business School. His research interests lie in innovation, organizational structure, labor market policy, and their application to public policy formation. He holds a PhD from NYU Stern School of Business and an AB with high honors in economics and mathematics from Dartmouth College. Prior to pursuing a career in academia, Daniel worked at McKinsey & Company for four years. His primary industry experience is in retail, fashion, and corporate portfolio restructuring. 

Professor Ran Kivetz is a tenured professor at Columbia University Business School, where he holds the Philip H. Geier endowed chair.  Professor Kivetz is a leading expert in the areas of behavioral economics, decision-making, marketing, customer behavior, incentives, and innovation.  His experience in these fields includes over twenty years of research, management, consulting, and teaching.  His latest research explores political science and political psychology through the lens of behavioral economics and decision research.

Bruce Kogut is the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. He teaches courses on Governance, Governance and Ethics, and Business Strategies and Solving Social Problems. He has taught in executive programs in the US, Europe, and China.

Professor Lehmann has taught several different marketing courses. His research focuses on individual and group choice and decision making, the adoption of innovation and new product development, and the management and valuation of marketing assets (brands, customers). He is also interested in knowledge accumulation, empirical generalizations, and information use. Lehmann has published more than 200 articles and books, serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and is the founding editor of Marketing Letters.

Sandra Matz takes a Big Data approach to studying human behavior in a variety of business-related domains. She combines methodologies from psychology and computer science – including machine learning, experimental designs, online surveys, and field studies – to explore the relationships between people’s psychological characteristics (e.g. their personality) and the digital footprints they leave with every step they take in the digital environment (e.g. their Facebook Likes or their credit card transactions).

Malia Mason teaches the Negotiations elective and co-directs the Women in Leadership Executive Education program at Columbia Business School. In addition to training Columbia graduates, she has brought her expertise to a variety of sectors including financial services, media, tech, telecom, and the arts, providing valuable consulting and training to employees at numerous firms.

Michael Mauskapf is an Assistant Professor of Management at Columbia Business School, where he studies the dynamics of creativity, innovation, and success in cultural markets, especially the music industry. His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Academy of Management Review, and the Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, and it has been featured in a number of popular press outlets, including ABC News, BBC News, The Economist, New York Post, NPR, and Quartz. Michael is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (B.A.

Stephan Meier is currently the chair of the Management Division and the James P. Gorman Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Zurich, was previously a senior economist at the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision-Making at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and taught courses on strategic interactions and economic policy at Harvard University and the University of Zurich. His research interest is in behavioral strategy.

Vicki Morwitz is the Bruce Greenwald Professor of Business and Professor of Marketing at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. Professor Morwitz earned a B.S in applied mathematics and computer science from Rutgers University, an M.S. in operations research from Polytechnic Institute of New York (now NYU’s Tandon School), and an M.A. in statistics and a Ph.D. in marketing from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Columbia, she served on the faculty of the Stern School at NYU for 28 years.

Michael Morris is a Chaired Professor in the Management Division at CBS and also serves as Professor in the Psychology Department of Columbia University. 

He teaches MBA and executive-level classes on leadership, teamwork, communication, negotiation, and decision-making. In 2016, he was honored with the Dean's Award for Innovation in the Curriculum for creating two of the school's most popular elective courses: The Leader's Voice and the Patagonia Leadership Expedition.

Professor Netzer's expertise centers on one of the major business challenges of the data-rich environment: developing quantitative methods that leverage data to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior and guide firms' decisions. He focuses primarily on building statistical and econometric models to measure consumer preferences and understand how customer choices change over time, and across contexts. Most notably, he has developed a framework for managing firms' customer bases through dynamic segmentation.

Professor Pham’s business expertise covers the areas of marketing strategy and management, branding, customer and consumer psychology, trademark psychology, marketing communication, and executive decision making. His most recent research focuses on the role of feelings, emotions and motivation in consumers’ and managers’ judgments and decisions.

Michael Slepian is the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Associate Professor of Leadership and Ethics in the Management Division of Columbia Business School. His program of research examines secrecy and trust. He studies the psychology of secrets and how keeping secrets affects two important variables that govern social and organizational life: trust and motivation. He has studied the consequences of keeping secrets, including how they change our behavior, judgments and actions.

Dan Wang is Lambert Family Associate Professor of Business and (by courtesy) Sociology at Columbia Business School, where he is also the Co-Director of the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise.  His research examines how social networks drive social and economic transformation through the analysis of global migration, social movements, organizational innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Professor Schmitt is Robert D. Calkins Professor of International Business at Columbia Business School. He researches, teaches, and advises corporations on branding, innovation, creative strategy, and customer experience.

Olivier Toubia is the Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. His research focuses on various aspects of innovation, including preference measurement and idea generation. Specifically, he combines methods from social sciences and data science, in order to study human processes such as motivation, choice, and creativity. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief at the journal Marketing Science. He teaches a course on Foundations of Innovation and the core marketing course. He received his MS in Operations Research and PhD in Marketing from MIT.