All The New Professors At The Leading Business Schools

A new lineup of professors is welcoming MBA students across the top 25 campuses in the United States this fall — and Harvard hired more than any other elite school

NEW FACULTY AT THE TOP SCHOOLS

David Edelman, Harvard Business School: A sought-after advisor on digital transformation and marketing strategy, David developed foundational business concepts such as ‘The Customer Decision Journey,’ and ‘Segment-of-One Marketing.’ Most recently, he guided Aetna (now part of CVS Health) through becoming a digitally-oriented, customer-centric enterprise. David has been repeatedly recognized by Forbes as one of the ‘Most Influential CMOs in the World,’ and by AdWeek as one of the ‘Top 20 Marketing and Technology Executives.’  His writing and work has attracted over 1.1 million followers to his LinkedIn blog, and he has delivered dozens of keynote presentations at conferences around the world.

David Edelman

Diane Gherson, HBS: In December 2020, Diane retired as an officer of IBM after serving seven years as Chief Human Resources Officer, responsible for the people and culture of IBM’s global workforce of 360,000. Ranked #3 on Forbes World’s Best Employer list, IBM is also ranked #3 Best Managed Company by the WSJ/Drucker Institute. During her tenure as CHRO, Diane redesigned all aspects of the company’s people agenda and management systems to support a massive shift in the business portfolio, shaping a culture of continuous learning, innovation and agility. She championed the company’s global adoption of design thinking and agile methods at scale, as examples, driving a company-wide, co-created overhaul of performance management and for designing return to the workplace. Diane infused AI and automation across all HR offerings, resulting in hundreds of millions of annual net benefits, better employee experience and world-class employee engagement. She also achieved record industry-leading diversity results by pioneering non-degree hiring and apprenticeships for software programmers.

George Osborne, Stanford GSB: Osborne served as Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016. During that time, Osborne was a member of the National Security Council, and from 2015 to 2016, he also served as Britain’s First Secretary of State. He is currently the Editor of the Evening Standard, London’s daily newspaper. He is also the Chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, a not- for-profit organization he created that promotes economic development in the North of England. He is the Kissinger Fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership and an honorary professor of economics at the University of Manchester in the UK. Osborne previously taught at the GSB where he held the role of Dean’s Fellow, and he was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution September 1, 2018, through August 31, 2020. Osborne teaches GSBGEN 595, High-Stakes Decision Making.

Frank Ahimaz, MIT: Ahimaz has spent the past 30 years investing globally for some of the world’s leading financial institutions including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Chemical Venture Partners. Most recently he served as the CIO of the Museum of Modern Art and managed a complex portfolio of both long-only and alternative assets including private equity, venture capital, absolute return, credit and real assets along with creating thoughtful currency and interest rate hedging strategies He helped transform MoMA’s endowment into one of the most successful, sophisticated and exciting endowments relative to its $1 billion+ peers.

The former global head of diversity & belonging at Airbnb. Melissa Thomas-Hunt, returns to UVA Darden this year

Melissa Thomas-Hunt, UVA Darden: For Thomas-Hunt, this is a return trip to the Charlottesville, Va., campus. She had served as Global Chief Diversity Officer at Darden until 2017 hen she went to Vanderbilt University as vice provost for inclusive excellence. She rejoins Darden after a near two and one-half year stint as the global head of diversity and belonging at Airbnb. Thomas-Hunt has held Full, Associate and Assistant Professorial roles for over 20 years at schools such as Vanderbilt, the University of Virginia, Cornell University, and Washington University in St Louis. Her research and teaching focused on organizational behavior and the factors that unleash, leverage and amplify the talents and contributions made by women and underrepresented individuals. She began her career at IBM as a marketing representative and received her master’s and doctoral degrees from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management and her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Princeton University.

David A. Hirshleifer, USC Marshall: David A. Hirshleifer is a world-renowned financial economist and the most recent president of the American Finance Association. He has served as editor of two of the top three finance journals (Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Financial Studies), has made seminal contributions to several areas in academic finance and economics, and is considered a world leader in social and behavioral finance. His academic record, with some 80 peer-reviewed articles garnering nearly 12,000 SSCI and nearly 50,000 Google scholar citations, places him in the highest echelons of the profession.

Hirshleifer earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from UCLA, and his master’s and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. He was most recently the Merage Chair in Business Growth and Distinguished Professor of Finance and Economics at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. Before joining UCI in 2006, Hirshleifer obtained tenure at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and held endowed-chaired positions at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business and the Ohio State University Fisher College of Business.