Meet the Team

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.

Vanessa Burbano is the Donald C. Waite III Associate Professor of Social Enterprise in the strategy area at Columbia Business School.

Wei Cai joined Columbia University in 2020. Her research interests revolve around management accounting, organizational culture, and diversity and inclusion. Her research broadly investigates how to measure and manage key organizational capital. For example, she examines how corporate leaders and managers can deliberately design and shape organizational culture, and improve organizational outcomes through innovative management control systems. She uses multiple research methods including statistical analyses of archival data sources, field experiments, and surveys.

Ashli Carter is a Lecturer in the Management Division at Columbia Business School. Currently, she teaches topics in leadership, negotiations, and cultivating a growth mindset in the MBA and Executive Education programs, as well as for CBS administrators and staff. Prior to joining CBS faculty, she taught MBA and undergraduate courses in leadership and professional ethics at NYU Stern where she was an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Management and Organizations.

R.A. Farrokhnia, a recipient of the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence, is an Executive Director at the Dean's Office of "Advanced Projects and Applied Research in Fintech." He also teaches courses at Schools of Business and Engineering; in addition, he is a lecturer and Board Member of the Knight-Bagehot Program at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

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.

Professor Glasserman's research and teaching address risk management, quant finance, Monte Carlo simulation, statistics and operations. Prior to joining Columbia, Glasserman was with Bell Laboratories; he has also held visiting positions at Princeton University, NYU, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In 2011-2012, he was on leave from Columbia and working at the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department, where he continues to serve as a part-time consultant.

Geoffrey Heal, Donald C. Waite III Professor Emeritus of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, is noted for contributions to economic theory and resource and environmental economics. He holds bachelors (first class), masters and doctoral degrees from Cambridge University, where he studied at Churchill College and taught at Christ’s College. He has also taught at Sussex, Essex, Yale, Stanford, École Polytechnique, Stockholm and Princeton. He holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Universite´ de Paris Dauphine.

Professor Donna M. Hitscherich currently serves as a senior lecturer of Finance, director of the Private Equity Program, and a Bernstein Faculty Leader at the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. Professor Hitscherich’s courses include Corporate Finance as well as the elective courses Business Law, Mergers and Acquisitions, and Advanced Corporate Finance. In 2002, she was nominated for the Dean’s Award for Innovation in the MBA Curriculum for her presentation of the Advanced Corporate Finance course.

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.

Professor Jick is a leading expert in Leadership and Organizational Change.  He has had a long career of both academic and consulting work in this field. In 2020, he became the Reuben Mark Faculty Director of Organizational Character and Leadership. He has an MS and PhD from Cornell in Organizational Behavior. He was a professor at the Harvard Business School for 10 years and a visiting professor, organizational behavior-human resource management at INSEAD and London Business School. 

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. Professor Johar received the Distinguished Alumnus award from IIMC in 2019. 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.

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.

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).

Christian is the Sidney Taurel Associate Professor within the Finance and Economics Division at Columbia Business School. His research focuses on macroeconomics and labor economics, with additional interests in public economics. The common theme behind his research is to understand the determinants of earnings inequality and the role redistributive policies. Before joining Columbia, Christian received a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University where he was named a Fellow of Woodrow Wilson Scholars and was awarded the Towbes Prize for Outstanding Teaching.

Rebecca Ponce de Leon is an Assistant Professor in the Management Division of Columbia Business School. Her research is grounded in the desire to uncover the processes that hinder progress toward diversity and equality in organizations and society more broadly. She approaches this topic by exploring how social categories, like race and gender, and motivated beliefs, like social dominance ideologies, lead to patterns of bias in perceptions and behavior.

Valerie Purdie-Greenaway serves as Director for the Laboratory of Intergroup Relations and the Social Mind (LIRSM). She is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University, core faculty for the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program (RWJ Columbia-site), and research fellow at the Institute for Research on African-American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia.

Shiva Rajgopal is the Roy Bernard Kester and T.W. Byrnes Professor of Accounting and Auditing at Columbia Business School. He has also been a faculty member at the Duke University, Emory University and the University of Washington. Professor Rajgopal’s research interests span financial reporting, earnings quality, fraud, executive compensation and corporate culture.  His research is frequently cited in the popular press, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Fortune, Forbes, Financial Times, Business Week, and the Economist.

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

Nicole Royer is the Assistant Director at the Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School.