2026 Best 40-Under-40 Business Professors: Kristin Donnelly, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

 

Kristin Donnelly
Booth School of Business
University of Chicago  

“Professor Kristin Donnelly stands out for combining rigorous scholarship with exceptional classroom impact. She brings clarity, intellectual energy, and real relevance to every interaction, helping students see how consumer behavior and decision-making research apply directly to business leadership. Her teaching impact comes from her rare ability to make behavioral science both intellectually rigorous and highly applicable. In courses such as Consumer Behavior, she helps students move beyond intuition and develop a more precise understanding of how people actually make choices. Booth has highlighted her course as a favorite because of how effectively she connects psychology, decision-making, and business practice.” – Israel Dartiguenave

Kristin Donnelly, 38, is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where she teaches Consumer Behavior to Full-Time MBA, Evening/Weekend MBA and Master’s in Management students. Her research focuses on judgment and decision-making, particularly how consumers perceive time, estimate quantities, and form impressions of themselves and others. 

Her work has been published in Psychological Science, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, among others. She received the Einhorn-Hogarth New Investigator Award for research on time perception. In 2026 she was named one of four Cornell Saroj and Vithala Rao Young Scholars, an award given to early-career marketing researchers. At Booth, she recently received the Excellence in PhD Advising Award, given annually to one junior and one senior faculty member. 

Her research has been covered in media outlets such as TIME, The Atlantic, and Forbes. She earned her PhD in Marketing from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley in 2022. 

BACKGROUND 

At current institution since what year? 2022 

Education: PhD from Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley 

List of MBA/graduate business courses you currently teach: Consumer Behavior and occasionally a PhD Marketing Seminar 

TELL US ABOUT LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR 

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when …  Clayton Critcher, a marketing professor at Berkeley Haas, encouraged me to apply to their PhD program. That’s when I seriously entertained the idea and realized I would love to study human behavior with the kind of resources and freedom business school offers. And on the teaching side, I low-key love “edu-taining”. The material can be genuinely interesting (in my opinion) and I try not to make it boring. 

What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it? I study how people make judgments about magnitude, particularly time. One thing my coauthor Jiabi Wang and I have found is that the same wait feels different depending on whether it’s framed as a duration (“ready in 30 minutes”) or as a clock time (“ready at 6:30”). The two formats scale differently in the mind, which can flip which one feels longer depending on how long the interval actually is. We’re also running field experiments with Instacart testing whether changing ETA formats at checkout shifts customers’ willingness to pay for faster delivery. 

If I weren’t a business school professor… Hmm. I’d probably be making deranged sculptures somewhere, which is something that I loved doing outside of work in grad school. There’s something beautiful and satisfying about taking a block of clay and pulling a new thing out of it. A physical thing, unlike the ethereal stuff professors make with papers. 

What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? I’d defer to students here, but I probably have a darker sense of humor, fewer filters, and a flatter sense of hierarchy. 

Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor: That the work never ends, and it’s rarely obvious when you’ve done enough. You have to decide that for yourself, which is harder than it sounds. The trick seems to be making peace with juggling a dozen unfinished things at once, and with the fact that they follow you home. At least that’s what I tell myself. 

Professor I most admire and why: Too many to name. It’s worth saying out loud that this career runs on people who invest in others and take the time to help them. Clayton Critcher, Ellen Evers and Leif Nelson. Ed Vul. Craig McKenzie. Radmila Prislin. Remarkable people who influenced me more than they know. The professors I admire most are the ones who treat mentorship as part of the work, not a side activity or something that’s only worth doing insofar as it serves their own goals. 

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students? Teaching them ideas that might be genuinely useful for decisions in their own lives or help them understand themselves better as humans. Some of my favorite in-class moments come during presentations where they have room to get creative. And I love when they make me laugh. 

What is most challenging? Resisting the urge to answer almost every question with “it depends” or “that’s complicated.” Human behavior has too many simultaneous drivers for clean answers, and sometimes different findings genuinely appear to contradict each other. But students need something they can use, so I try to land takeaways that are usable for their lives without totally flattening the complexity. Figuring out which nuances to keep and which to defer is a constant judgment call. 

When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as… Fair, I hope. We are required to impose a 3.33 average, which makes the distribution easy. Within that, I am sympathetic to effort and participation.  

LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM 

What are your hobbies? Honestly, hobbies have been a casualty of the last few years. I do play Sudoku every night, so maybe that counts. Would love to get back into sculpting. 

How will you spend your summer? Travel, friends and family, perennial work, and hopefully lots of time in nature. 

Favorite place(s) to vacation: The beach in Michigan around New Buffalo. Northwest Arkansas where my mom lives. 

Favorite book(s): Mostly fiction, and I don’t have favorites. I recently read Yesteryear, which is a page-turner and offers a sharp lens on trad wives. 

What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much? Again, no favorites. I enjoyed Dark Matter on Apple TV earlier this year. The premise involves the multiverse, and it’s set in Chicago neighborhoods near where I live, which made it especially fun. 

What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why? I like most types of music. Lately it’s a lot of dreamy indie jams, random country songs, and classics like Fleetwood Mac. 

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS 

If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this…  More real-person talk and fewer douchey non-words like “learnings,” “value-add,” “synergies,” and “thought leadership.” When I was a PhD student TA-ing MBA classes, I kept a running list of all these words and phrases just to figure out wtf they were saying. I find myself dropping them sometimes to signal to the class that I’m in the know (because I’m not), and I cringe every time. 

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at…  Treating sustainable workloads as an organizational responsibility, not solely a personal one. A lot of organizations expect employees to manage their own burnout (you should meditate more, set boundaries, manage your stress!) while leaving the actual workload untouched. They expect workers to advocate for themselves against real constraints like social norms, cultural pressure, and the general malaise of corporate dystopia, without changing what they’re being asked to do. Many companies offer unlimited vacation, and people end up taking fewer days than they would under a fixed allotment. Real change needs to come, at least in part, from what organizations expect of people and not just how individuals manage to absorb it. 

I’m grateful for…  About ten years working in restaurants, waiting tables, making sandwiches, doing very random side gigs. Most of it during school, some of it nearly full-time on its own. Those experiences probably shaped me more than I realize. I’m also grateful to have landed in a very different life, getting paid to think about questions I find interesting, and try not to lose sight of that. 

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

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