2026 Best 40-Under-40 Business Professors: Léonard Boussioux, University of Washington, Foster School of Business

Léonard Boussioux
Foster School of Business
University of Washington

“Léonard is a professor who fundamentally changes how students think about AI and problem solving. One of the most memorable experiences in his class was a live session where students built real applications using AI within a single class. What stood out was not just the outcome, but the mindset shift. He showed us that working with AI is about creativity and problem framing, not just technical skills. He consistently challenges students to think critically about both the power and responsibility of AI. His classes are engaging, hands on, and deeply relevant to real world problems. I continue to apply what I learned from his class in my work today, which reflects the lasting impact of his teaching.” – Alexis Shen

Léonard Boussioux, 30, is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Operations Management at the University of Washington’s Michael G. Foster School of Business, with an adjunct appointment at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and an affiliation at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard.

His research sits at the intersection of operations research, machine learning, and generative AI, with a focus on how humans and AI systems can collaborate on high-stakes decisions across healthcare operations, natural disaster management, climate, sustainability, and the future of work and science.

Boussioux earned his Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT, where he received the Goodwin Medal — the Institute’s highest teaching honor for a graduate instructor — alongside two additional MIT teaching awards and 1st place in the MIT Three Minute Thesis Competition. At Foster, he has earned five teaching and mentorship awards in his first two years, including the Dean’s Excellence Award for Graduate Teaching and the Charles E. Summer Memorial Teaching Award; secured research grants from the Strategic Research Foundation and AI@UW; serves as an AI Ambassador and on the Foster AI Task Force; and was named to the Puget Sound Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 list. He delivers AI education to over 1000 students annually across MBA, Executive MBA, Master’s, and undergraduate programs.

His scholarly and applied work has earned distinctions including the INFORMS William Pierskalla Best Paper Award for his team’s COVID-19 modeling, 1st place at the Wharton People Analytics White Paper Competition, Best in Track Paper at ICIS 2025, 2nd place at INFORMS’ Doing Good with Good OR for using machine learning to reduce air pollution, the Zetta Prize for Best Application of AI in Industry, and 1st place at the INFORMS Poster Competition for Holistic AI for Wildlife Analytics.

His work has been published in Organization Science, Nature Digital Medicine, MIT Sloan Management Review, Health Care Management Science, Machine Learning, and the AAAI proceedings, among others, and has been featured by Reuters, Fast Company, GeekWire, and other outlets.

Boussioux trained at Google X (the Moonshot Factory), Mila with Yoshua Bengio, and the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at UC Berkeley. He teaches the fundamentals of AI for MIT Universal AI, an open educational initiative bringing state-of-the-art AI to broad audiences, and is a frequent advisor and speaker on enterprise AI adoption, vibe coding, agentic systems, and the formation of “AI Champions,” a concept central to his teaching. He completed his Master of Science in Applied Mathematics and undergraduate engineering degree at CentraleSupélec in France.

BACKGROUND

At current institution since what year? 2023

Education:

• Ph.D., Operations Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2023
• M.Sc., Applied Mathematics, CentraleSupélec, Paris-Saclay, France, 2019
• B.Eng., CentraleSupélec, Paris-Saclay, France, 2019

List of MBA / graduate business courses you currently teach: Generative AI and AI for Business Applications (core graduate course for specialized masters), Advanced Machine Learning (core graduate course for specialized masters). Bootcamps and workshops on Generative AI, agentic systems, and AI strategy across Foster’s MBA, Executive MBA, specialized master’s, and undergraduate programs

LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR 

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when…Well, I never wanted to be a professor. I come from a family of teachers, and that path felt almost too inherited. During my whole education, I wanted to be an engineer, a scientist, an innovator, a discoverer, and an artist, without really knowing how that could be possible. Then I went to MIT for my Ph.D., and academia revealed all its beauties to me.

Watching my advisor, Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas, and the community around me, I realized being a professor wasn’t the narrow job I had envisioned: instead, it was a path to do all of the jobs I had ever wanted, at once. Chasing the deepest questions about the world and how nature works. Building systems that create tangible impact. Connecting with real businesses and real people. Telling stories that move ideas from one mind to another. The calling for teaching had been there my entire life, and I had finally found the way to express it. The business school turned out to be the perfect home for that: a place to do rigorous research, deploy it in the world, and help students find the version of their dream they had been quietly carrying.

What are you currently researching, and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it? My research, conducted with my Human-AI Operations Lab and a broad network of collaborators, examines how humans and AI systems can work together to accelerate problem-solving on pressing challenges. My program spans three connected threads. First, I study human-AI collaboration in creative and analytical work, with a particular interest in how generative AI reshapes individual productivity, team dynamics, and the future of work. Second, I build agentic systems for science: AI workflows that support scientific discovery and rigorous decision-making in domains such as natural disaster management, ecosystem conservation, and healthcare operations. Third, I develop the methodological foundations these systems require, including multimodal architectures that integrate language, imagery, and unstructured data; robust models that hold up under distribution shift and real-world deployment; and explainable methods that make AI outputs auditable in high-stakes settings.

One of my favorite discoveries is what I call the creativity paradox of AI. At the individual level, generative AI can raise the quality and novelty of work. At the collective level, it compresses the idea space: outputs converge, and the long tail of unconventional, breakthrough ideas thins. We have replicated this pattern across four studies spanning short-story writing, sustainability solutions, humor, and collaborative storytelling. The implication is sharp: the competitive advantage of the next decade will be on combining the strengths of human ingenuity and AI’s superpowers.

If I weren’t a business school professor… I would be an adventurer, an explorer, a wildlife photographer, a discoverer of rare minerals and even rarer birds and orchids. I would spend my days in rainforests and the most remote corners of the world, trying to understand the secrets of color, sound, smell, and the deep, patient intelligence of nature itself.

What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? The way I treat the course itself: as an adventure in which my students are the heroes. On day one, every student is invited to think of their dream project, and from there the entire course is reverse-engineered to bring those dreams come true. I want each student to feel like the main character of their own story, sense that we are uncovering magic together, and leave the room with new superpowers.

I also teach far beyond the syllabus. Every session braids in stories, mysteries, and surprises drawn from biomimicry, the history of innovation, psychology, and the natural world. I want students walking out with ideas that will follow them long after the course material is forgotten.

And I make them build, build, build, because the moment students create something with their own hands, they get attached; and attached students learn differently. Every lecture is structured like a story: a narrative arc, well-placed mysteries, unexpected turns, moments of joy. I want a room where everyone feels alive, a harmonious ecosystem in itself.

Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor: The job is closer to running a shape-shifting company than to anything I had pictured. You are the founder, the strategist, the head of HR, and the talent, all at once, and the role keeps reinventing itself underneath you. There is also a touring-artist quality to it: lectures, talks, and conferences, with the corresponding choreography of travel, time zones, energy management, and the craft of delivering the research and teaching themselves.

What no one tells you is that the work is also a kind of rite of passage. You are constantly being asked to serve as a role model in new and unfamiliar ways, and the responsibility shapes your character as much as your research does.

Professor I most admire and why: I have far too many role models to name just one. A few who come to mind. First, my Ph.D. advisor, Dimitris Bertsimas: larger than life, and the person who showed me what it looks like to do our job with passion and to chase the biggest horizons. Alex Jacquillat, for the depth of his care for students and the elegance of his teaching. Sébastien Martin, an innovator and insatiable creative whose next project I always look forward to. Manolis Kellis, who creates whirlwinds wherever he goes and moves through the world with fluidity and genius. Dokyun Lee, for the way he shapes a research lab and stays at the frontier of technology, wielding it with both ambition and judgment. And Jackie Lane, who showed me how to lead with kindness and how to build a team that can achieve almost anything.

Earlier still, two of my high school teachers, Rose-Marie Henric and Ivan Puig Otero, taught me Spanish and English and pushed every boundary for our learning. And of course, before all of them, my Mom, who was my French teacher! And my Dad, who was teaching me everything.

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students?I have to reinvent myself constantly, and it feels like every lecture is a performance and an act of creation. I love seeing the wonders my students create, hearing about their successes and their stories, getting to know so many lives year after year, following them, and knowing that I get to be part of their path. There is something magical about meeting students: you witness their brilliance before anyone else, and sometimes you are the one showing it to them. When they finally see it themselves, it is a treasure that shines in every light.

What is most challenging? Saying no. The job comes with a steady stream of remarkable opportunities reaching out to you, and time is the most precious thing you have. You have to plan with real care, while still leaving generous room for serendipity, because some of the best things only happen when the calendar is not full. Saying no is hard because we want to do everything. Learning to choose, slowly and on purpose, is one of the greatest skills this job teaches.

When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as… Rigorous but generous in spirit. I am always inventing new assignments: unconventional, competitive, deliberately out of the comfort zone, for them and for me. What I care about most, though, is not the grade itself. The most lasting feedback is the kind that students can feel for themselves. Real growth comes from the heart, not from a metric, and my hope is that they leave the course able to recognize their own progress without needing a number to validate it.

LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM 

What are your hobbies? Bird watching, especially the discovery of the rarest species. I have a dream of one day reaching 10,000 species on Earth – orchids, dragonflies, butterflies, and wildflowers – with the same joy of seeing new species and learning their names.

I also love photographing them and curating photo exhibitions. I am deeply passionate about color, the way it takes shape in the natural world. I love collecting and finding minerals and rocks. I love vibe coding, building the apps and products I had always dreamed of making, and that are finally within reach today with generative AI. And, of course, teaching is one of my hobbies too! I love sharing the mysteries of life and nature with anyone who will listen.

How will you spend your summer? I emigrated to start a life in the U.S., and I always love going back to France to spend time with my family. This year, my brother, my sister, and I have planned a road trip across France to discover its most beautiful corners together. We are also planning to watch the total solar eclipse on August 12. I want to capture a once-in-a-lifetime picture, so I shall prepare for it! And, as usual, more birds, more wildflowers, and as much hiking as the days will allow.

Favorite place(s) to vacation: My travels always revolve around two vast opposites. The first is the familiarity of where I was born, in French Catalonia, one of the most beautiful places in the world, where the sea, the hills, and the mountains meet in a gorgeous play of nature (I used to write poetry in Catalan to celebrate our sacred mountain, the Canigou). The second is the pull toward the most exotic and unreachable gems of the world: remote Iceland, the deep Thai jungle, the Tasmanian bush, the Costa Rican rainforest, and anywhere I might find a new bird, a new flower, or a colony of seabirds I have never met before.

Favorite book(s): You can see I am obsessed with nature when the books that I read most often (nearly every day) are my field guides about birds, orchids, dragonflies, butterflies, and anything else I might encounter in the wild. I also love reading encyclopedias before sleep and getting lost in atlases.

In more conventional literature, The Outsider by Colin Wilson stood out in my formative teenage years for its remarkable synthesis of so many thinkers and literary figures. And I deeply admire the perfection Flaubert was always reaching for, particularly in Madame Bovary, where the pursuit of the exact word is felt in every sentence. I also return regularly to the French poets, especially Rimbaud and Baudelaire, for the way they make me dream and inspire me with unfathomable emotions.

What is currently your favorite movie and/or show, and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much? The documentary Ocean by David Attenborough. I always love a good BBC Earth or National Geographic documentary: they make me dream and want to keep discovering the mysteries of life. I deeply admire David Attenborough for the way he has spent a lifetime pursuing the same mission, showing the beauty of the Earth and reminding us, gently and persistently, that we must protect it.

What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why? My taste in music is huge and eclectic. I love the music of the 1960s and 70s: The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Queen, Pink Floyd, Simon and Garfunkel. I love classical music too: Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Stravinsky. And then a few that may surprise you: I listen to a lot of synthwave and phonk, especially while vibe coding, as they create a perfect flow for my deep AI work.

Yet, my favorite artists are the people in my family. My mother is an opera singer. My sister plays the violin and the piano, and sings. My brother is a film director. My girlfriend is a jazz singer. Music and art have always been the first language of our home.

And, beyond family, Leonardo da Vinci. He remains for me the model of a truly holistic scientist, and I was named after him.

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS 

If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this… More prototyping, more moonshotting, more hackathons aimed squarely at the biggest problems we face. I want to inspire students to build something bold while they are still students, not after. And I want to bring investors, industry leaders, and operators of every kind into the room: to witness their work, to help them grow, to invest in them, and to learn from them in return. The business school of the future is one where students dream at scale, where the gap between idea and prototype closes in days rather than years, and where the people who fund and run the world return to the classroom to teach and back the next generation of builders.

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at… Being more creative about how they operate. Most organizations still run on old-fashioned org charts and processes. I believe the ones that will pull ahead are willing to reconfigure how teams form, how people collaborate, and how everyone leverages AI tools. I am especially excited about flash teams: groups that can be assembled and dissolved in days around a specific problem, drawing on talent and tools that never used to fit together.

I would also love to see organizations look to nature more often for inspiration. Biological systems have spent billions of years solving the kinds of problems we are still trying to figure out, and the solutions are often more elegant than ours.

And finally, bring back the joy. Joy is fundamental to life. The workplaces I want to live in, and the ones I believe will win, are the ones where people feel energized, curious, and enthralled by what they do.

I’m grateful for… My family, always. The many teachers, friends, and mentors who shaped me at every stage of my life. Nature, which has been a constant teacher in its own right. My country of origin, France, for an education rich, rigorous, and holistic, and for the spirit of the Enlightenment that still runs through it. My girlfriend, who supports me through everything and brings joy to my life. And the colleagues, leaders, and students at Foster, who support my mission and help me bring my dreams to life.

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

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