2026 Best 40-Under-40 Business Professors: Julia Langdon, ESMT Berlin

Julia Langdon
ESMT Berlin 

“Julia Langdon represents the next generation of globally minded, research-driven, and pedagogically innovative business school faculty. She combines intellectual rigor with societal relevance, bringing cutting-edge scholarship into the classroom in ways that are both analytically demanding and practically meaningful. What distinguishes her most is the rare combination of three qualities: academic excellence, deep engagement with real-world managerial challenges, and an exceptional ability to translate complex ideas into powerful learning experiences. She is not only producing impactful research but also shaping how future leaders think about responsible decision-making in a rapidly changing global environment. Under the age of 40, she already demonstrates the maturity, leadership, and intellectual influence typically associated with far more senior scholars. Her trajectory signals both sustained excellence and growing international impact.” – Valentina Werner, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs

Julia Langdon, 35, joined ESMT Berlin as an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior in August 2023. Since April 2024, she has held the Volkswagen Group Junior Chair for Ethics and Diversity in Organizations.

She received her Ph.D. in Management from London Business School in 2023. She also holds a Master’s degree in Cognitive and Decision Sciences from University College London and a Bachelor’s degree in psychology from Warwick University. 

Julia’s research focuses on exploring how organizations can stop key organizational constituents—senior managers, board members, and employees—from acting unethically by identifying the complex psychological contortions people use to justify unethical behavior. She also investigates the factors that shape stakeholder responses following ethical scandals. 

In a second research stream, Julia also investigates how people’s beliefs about morality and their reasoning around it influence their own behavior and the behavior of others in unexpected ways. Connecting core theories of morality and human behavior to the study of lay theories and diversity, respectively, she explores potential interventions that can promote ethical behavior and inclusion, especially for disabled professionals. Across both of these programs of research, she uses experimental and field methods. 

Julia has published in Current Opinions in Psychology and Nature Reviews Psychology, and won the best teacher award for the MSC class of 2025. She has also been on Presidents honors roll for teaching for MSC class of 2024 and MBA classes 2024 and 2025.   

BACKGROUND 

At current institution since what year? 2023 

Education:  

• Ph.D. in Management, London Business School 
• Master’s degree in Cognitive and Decision Sciences, University College London 
• Bachelor’s degree in psychology, Warwick University

List of MBA/graduate business courses you currently teach:  Negotiation, Negotiating Leadership Challenges 

LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when… I was a research assistant and was providing teaching assistance to professors in class.  I realized the research questions were deeply engaging and required real depth, and that you then had to translate that broader expertise into something practical and genuinely useful in the classroom. It seemed like such an interesting and galvanizing job. The combination of wrestling with hard problems, pushing my own thinking through writing, and watching students engage with ideas in real time just clicked.  

What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it?  I’m a behavioral ethics scholar, and my work runs along two tracks. The first asks how organizations can actually stop the unethical behavior we know is pervasive at work — the kind that fills the headlines every month, and the more pervasive kind that we navigate every day. The second translates the scholarship of morality into practical organizational interventions, with a particular focus on a group that has been remarkably underrepresented in management research: people with disabilities. This project was also born from my interest in how people respond when on the receiving end of a person or organization’s morality. 

What I keep finding across studies, including a recent field experiment we ran with a FTSE 100 firm, is that how a firm communicates its moral motivation really matters to how people feel and act within the organization. Two messages can say almost the same thing on the surface, but employees react to the source of the organization’s commitment. Surprisingly, small cues meaningfully shift behavior. To me, that says people are essentially acting as detectives when they encounter moral messaging. They gather small pieces of evidence about where someone’s desire to “do the right thing” is really coming from and adjust their own behavior based on what they infer. 

If I weren’t a business school professor… I’d probably be working in policy or international negotiation. I find the actual craft of it fascinating, the slow work of getting parties with very different interests to an agreement. I’ve also had a half-serious lifelong fantasy of being an ornithologist. 

What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? I try to make class feel like a working session rather than a lecture. OB can drift into a set of relationships to memorize if you’re not careful, so I push hard on the messy, real version of every concept. To do this, I bring in cases, negotiations, and the kinds of problems my students are actually navigating at work. 

But the bigger thing I try to set up is the spirit of the room. I want students to treat the classroom as a testing ground — a place to try on approaches that aren’t their default, push past the version of themselves they walked in as, and put their reasoning on the line knowing it might not hold up. Critique is cheap; actually doing those things in front of your peers is hard, and it’s where real learning happens. I’m lucky that my students take to that, and they end up improving each other so much. 

One word that describes my first time teaching:  Absorbing. 

Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor: It’s far more entrepreneurial than I expected. You build your own research agenda, your own teaching style, your own network. You have to figure out a lot of that  by just doing it, which can be uncomfortable, but it’s also the freedom that makes the job so rewarding. 

Professor I most admire and why: Aneeta Rattan, my coauthor. She has one of the most genuinely inquiring minds I’ve encountered and has an unusual ability to transmit her belief in the people around her. She doesn’t hand you answers — she’s more like a whetstone you sharpen your own thinking against. What I’ve learned from her is that the most demanding form of mentorship is the one that refuses to do the thinking for you, while still leaving you certain you can do it yourself. That balance — high standards held alongside genuine belief in your capacity to meet them — is the standard I try to live up to with my own students. 

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students? They show up with experience, opinions, and skin in the game. They care so much about the applicability of frameworks and ideas that they naturally start thrashing out potential moderators: when does this hold, for whom, under what conditions? For an OB professor, that’s wonderful. These are people who are thinking hard about applying these ideas immediately, and the classroom becomes a live conversation between theory and practice. 

What is most challenging? Holding back my own excitement at the right moments. You can’t help but be enthused when students make a sharp move in a negotiation or land on a real insight, and my instinct is to step in and build on it. But that enthusiasm, well-meant as it is, can redirect where things were going. Taking a sip of tea helps. 

When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as… When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as… Fair, and perhaps too verbose in my feedback. 

LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM 

What are your hobbies? Hiking (with the hope of seeing an unusual bird), cooking (ambitiously, without a recipe), reading novels, and learning a language (Deutsch, natürlich). 

How will you spend your summer? Mostly pushing two papers I’ve been circling toward submission, and presenting at conferences in Vienna and Philadelphia. I’m also in the process of identifying my next field experiment partner — I enjoy working alongside companies that are wrestling with real questions about ethics or inclusion, and I’m keen to hear from organizations interested in that kind of collaboration. The summer ends in Bilbao. 

Favorite place(s) to vacation: Anywhere with mountains or water and good food. Recent favorites: Lago d’Orta, San Sebastián, Chania. 

Favorite book(s): For anyone navigating the constant onslaught of information that implies causality where there isn’t any, Causal Inference: The Mixtape by Scott Cunningham is genuinely useful — more for the habits of thought than the statistics. Beyond that, anything by Agatha Christie, and A Confederacy of Dunces (if you need to laugh at it all). 

What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much? They’re all old, but 30 Rock, Arrested Development, all the Poirots, and anything by David Attenborough. The Davids — Suchet and Attenborough — are both national treasures. 

What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why?  I’m pretty omnivorous, but Gregory Porter and Robyn are my main moods, depending on whether the day calls for jazz or higher-octane defiance. 

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS 

If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this… More attention to the ethical dimensions of decision-making across the curriculum, rather than treating them as a separate elective and more active debate as the method. Most of the hard decisions managers face involve genuine trade-offs between competing obligations, and the best way to get better at reasoning through those is to actually argue them out: take a position, defend it, watch it get pressure-tested by peers who see it differently. 

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at… Taking the small stuff seriously. Organizations tend to wait until a scandal forces their attention before they engage with culture or ethics. But by then, the cultures that produced the scandal were built out of years of small decisions nobody thought were ethical decisions at the time: what got tolerated, what got rewarded, who got a pass, what people stopped raising in meetings. The unglamorous work of paying attention to all of that is what actually prevents the headlines. 

I’m grateful for… The people around me. I’ve been very lucky with family and friends, and the support I’ve had at various points has been invaluable. I’m especially grateful to Gabe Adams, who gave me my first RAship — and sparked a curiosity that refuses to go out. 

 

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.