2026 Best 40-Under-40 Business Professors: Charleen Rose Case, HEC Paris

Charleen Rose Case
HEC Paris 

“Professor Case has had the most profound impact on my first year in the HEC Paris Master in Management program. Her approach to teaching, deep knowledge of the subject, and accessibility outside of class made her stand out. What truly set her apart was her ability to bridge academic content with real-world application, especially during a delicate phase in my personal life. She was always open to conversations about class material and personal matters, providing thoughtful, supportive insights that extended beyond the typical lecturer-student relationship. Professor Case’s expertise in organizational behavior was not just theoretical; it was practically applicable and helped me navigate both academic and personal challenges. This experience with her was unlike any I’ve had with other professors, where the subject matter truly resonated with me on a personal level.” – Marco Trombetti 

Charleen “Charlie” Case, 38, is an Assistant Professor of Management and Human Resources at HEC Paris, where she teaches in the Master in Management program and contributes to custom leadership programs in Executive Education. She serves as Doctoral Coordinator for the Department of Management and Human Resources and is a Faculty Affiliate of the NAOS Lab for Leadership, a newly launched HEC Paris initiative examining the human foundations of leadership in an age of artificial intelligence and complexity. 

Charlie’s research integrates organizational behavior, social psychology, and evolutionary science. She examines how fundamental human motives, such as a drive for status, affiliation, or kin care, shape decisions and behavior in hierarchically structured workplaces, with particular focus on leadership, mentorship, and hierarchy-bridging coalitions. 

Her work has been published in leading journals including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Harvard Business Review, Glamour, and Psychology Today. She is a Fellow of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

Before joining HEC Paris, Charlie was an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, where she taught Leadership Development in the MBA program and served as Course Coordinator of the core undergraduate course in Behavioral Theory of Management. 

She completed her PhD in Social Psychology at Florida State University while holding a concurrent position as a Visiting Research Fellow at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She earned her BA in Psychology and Anthropology from Miami University in Ohio, where early research in social cognition, human evolution, and primatology shaped her approach to understanding human social behavior. 

BACKGROUND 

At current institution since what year? 2025

Education: Ph.D., Social Psychology, Florida State University, 2017; M.S., Social Psychology, Florida State University, 2013; B.A., Psychology & Anthropology, Miami University, 2010

List of MBA/graduate business courses you currently teach:  Organizational Behavior, MIM program, M1, HEC Paris

TELL US ABOUT LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR 

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when…  My path to becoming a business school professor was circuitous and, in many ways, business school chose me. 

During my undergraduate years, I was driven less by a specific career goal than by a set of questions. As a first-generation college student from lesser means than many of my peers, I had learned to notice hierarchy dynamics early and found them deeply fascinating. I wanted to understand the whys and hows of social status navigation: the inner workings of competition, cooperation, and coalition formation.  

That curiosity led me through a wide range of intellectual terrain. I conducted primatological fieldwork in the Amazon, lab-based comparative neuroanatomy research, and ultimately chose to pursue a doctorate in social psychology, following the questions wherever they led. 

It was only in the later years of my PhD, when I (rather serendipitously) became a predoctoral fellow at the Kellogg School of Management, that I realized the questions I cared most about were also central to organizational life: how people acquire and maintain status, exercise influence, and invest in relationships. I did not know whether business school management departments would have an appetite for my brand of research, but I decided to give that job market a shot.  

And I’m so glad I did. I love the range of what being a business school professor allows: teaching across formats and audiences, building new initiatives, and mentoring doctoral students. The questions that first drew me into research still animate my work today, and now I get to explore them with students who are actively trying to lead, influence, and invest in the people around them. 

What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it? One of my current research streams examines the motivational processes behind mentorship. Mentorship is widely celebrated as a positive workplace relationship, but from a hierarchy perspective it presents a puzzle: why do higher-ranking people so often invest time, advocacy, and emotional energy in someone below them, often with no guarantee of return? The psychological experience of holding a higher-ranking position often makes people more self-focused and oriented toward their own goals. Yet mentors routinely absorb real personal costs on behalf of someone junior to them. 

My research suggests that mentorship activates a deeply rooted motivational system: parental-care psychology. The structure of mentorship appears to engage psychological mechanisms associated with caring for, protecting, and investing in a developing dependent. Critically, this effect is not driven simply by generalized affiliation or status-seeking. It is (allo)parental care in particular, activated by the structure of the relationship itself. That finding suggests mentorship is not just a reciprocal exchange, but a relationship that can draw on some of the same motivational architecture that supports long-term care, protection, and developmental investment. 

If I weren’t a business school professor…  I would be a novelist. Hands down. I love the process of character- and world-building, and I especially enjoy creating stories shaped by folklore, hidden worlds, and the strange social rules that govern them. Now, whether I could make ends meet as a novelist is another question entirely, so I’d also be happily keeping a day job at a natural history museum. 

What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? Honestly, this question is best answered by my students. From my own perspective, I suspect it is some combination of my unconventional background, my genuine enthusiasm for discussing ideas, and my investment in getting to know my students as people. I care deeply about them and their futures, and I think (and hope) that shows. 

Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor:  The transition from PhD student to professor is more demanding than it appears from the outside. Before you’re quite ready, you’re expected to excel not only at research, but also at teaching and mentoring, and each domain could be a full-time job on its own. What’s more, your students and mentees are watching you as much as they are listening to you; you are not just delivering content or teaching concrete skills, you are modeling what it looks like to be curious, rigorous, principled, and human at the same time. That human part is important (and you cannot fully exorcise it, anyway). Lean into it. 

Professor I most admire and why:  Scott Suarez, who taught my introduction to biological anthropology, primate behavioral ecology, and senior capstone courses at Miami University. He was brilliant, delightfully eccentric, and had a dry sense of humor that rewarded your close attention. But above all, Scott was deeply human. He did not perform the sanitized professor role. He was himself and his authenticity made him immediately trustworthy to what could, at times, be a skeptical audience. His lessons felt more like conversations, even when they were proper one-sided lectures; it was as though you were getting insider information from a trusted ally who knew far more than you but never took himself too seriously. 

Scott is the reason I can tell you (wow, 20 years later) that the only true synapomorphy of primates is the petrosally-derived auditory bulla. He is also the reason I had life-changing research experiences abroad, and why I ultimately decided to become a professor. He is the professor I have been trying to become. 

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students? I most enjoy the connections that extend beyond the classroom. Some of my most meaningful conversations with students happen in office hours, or years after a course has ended. It is deeply gratifying when former students reach out to say that a framework from class helped them navigate a difficult teammate, sell an internal initiative, or earn a promotion. 

Recently, I caught up over Zoom with a student I taught five years ago as an undergraduate. She shared that the influence strategies she had learned in my class helped her secure buy-in from senior leadership for an initiative that held a lot of personal significance for her, and that she had just been admitted to one of the world’s top MBA programs. What struck me most, though, was that she also wanted to know how I was doing, and she really listened. That kind of enduring connection is one of the things I treasure most about teaching, and something I did not fully anticipate when I started. 

What is most challenging? Teaching a course that many students initially approach with skepticism. Organizational behavior does not always feel urgent to pre-experience students who came to business school focused on finance or consulting. Because they often have limited professional experience to draw on when they arrive, the relevance is not always immediately obvious. The challenge is earning their genuine engagement rather than just getting them to go through the motions, and doing it quickly enough that the material has a chance to land before their interviews, internships, and early career roles begin. 

When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as…  Fair, though perhaps stricter than they had expected. I think my warmth in the classroom leads some students to assume the grading will be equally forgiving. It is not. I take grading seriously precisely because I take my students seriously. 

LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM 

What are your hobbies? When I lived in the US, I volunteered with wildlife rehabilitators, helping them nurse injured and orphaned raccoons and opossums back to health before rereleasing them into the wild. I have not yet found an equivalent in Paris, but I am getting to know the local fauna through my morning safaris about this beautiful city. At dawn, Paris belongs only to me, the magpies, the pigeons, and the rats who scurry off with a forgotten frite or some such treasure. I find them all delightful. 

How will you spend your summer? Outside of traveling for conferences and talks, I plan to spend a lot of time pushing my French beyond the intermediate plateau—through classes, language exchanges, and many humbling conversations with patient Parisians. 

Favorite place(s) to vacation:  Anywhere I have not yet been, though Greece has a very strong case for a return visit. 

Favorite book(s):  I’m not sure I have a single favorite, but books I have loved recently include Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and Simone de Beauvoir’s Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée. I should admit that the latter I read in translation. I am, however, currently wrapping up a French classic in its original language: Grammaire Progressive du Français (A2-B1), which has warranted extensive marginalia. 

What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much?  My current favorite show is Dark, the German Netflix thriller. I am drawn to stories that are eerie, atmospheric, and philosophically ambitious, where darkness serves the story rather than existing for shock value. It also trusts the viewer to pay attention, and I like a story that makes you work a little. That said, one of my favorite movies is Thor: Ragnarok. I love Norse mythology, and Taika Waititi skillfully riffs on it. This film has made me cry from laughter even on the rewatch. I’m not sure what they have in common. Perhaps there is a throughline there. 

What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why? What I kick on at any given moment depends entirely on what I am trying to feel or experience. Lately that has included old school jazz, downtempo electronica, and music with awe-inspiring stringwork. But sometimes it means something euphoric, or slightly unhinged, or purely nostalgic. Sometimes it is Appalachian folk; sometimes it is Scandinavian folk metal. 

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS 

If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this…  More interdisciplinary thinking. The most interesting questions in organizational life rarely respect disciplinary boundaries, and yet business school curricula tend to stay safely within them. 

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at…  Investing in genuine human connection. As AI reshapes how work gets done, the relational and interpersonal dimensions of organizational life risk being deprioritized precisely when they matter most. People are already lonelier and more disconnected than they used to be, and organizations have both the opportunity and the responsibility to take that seriously. 

I’m grateful for…  The professor-mentors who invested in my growth, my aspirations, and my personal wellbeing. And all without promise of reciprocity or any calculable ROI. Their unstinting nurturance, advocacy, and support have shaped not only my career but also the person I have become. I am also grateful for the privilege of now being a professor myself. What a joy it is to learn, create, mentor, and teach! Even the sense of generativity this profession offers feels somewhat self-indulgent. 

DON’T MISS: THE ENTIRE 2026 ROSTER OF THE WORLD’S BEST 40-UNDER-40 GRADUATE BUSINESS PROFESSORS 

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.