Poets&Quants' World's Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors Of 2025

Yahoo

21-05-2025

If all business is global, then certainly a premier business education must be global as well.
Take , an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior who teaches global leadership at University College London School of Management. Yan grew up in Beijing, then lived on a farm in Eastern Tennessee where he attended a Southern Baptist high school and learned to speak English. His hint of a Southern drawl sometimes confuses the MBAs he now teaches in London.
Since he was 7 years old, Yan's favorite books are Wuxia, a genre of fiction depicting the legends and adventures of martial artists, often in ancient China. Some of his favorite movies, on the other hand, come straight from La La Land. (He's such a film buff, in fact, he keeps a film-watching journal.)
As a professor, he actively works to build bridges between Asia, the U.S., and the United Kingdom, translating research between Mandarin and English. He also serves on the panel of Carolyn Dexter Award, recognizing efforts to internationalize the Academy of Management.
Tom Taiyi Yan, University College London School of Management
'In Mandarin there's a phrase that translates to 'mutual learning between students and teacher' (教学相长),' says Yan, 33. 'These cross-cultural experiences give me a unique perspective in today's world, and I use these stories in the classroom to build a safe environment for students from all walks of life.'
Yan is just one of 40 standout MBA professors on Poets&Quants' 2025 list of the world's Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors, a list full of compelling contrasts and distinctive voices.
Among them is , 38, of Temple's , who blends ancient mindfulness with research on explosive demolitions, exploring how attention and awareness shape operations. , 36, of , studies the moral weight of meaningful work, uncovering how even UN peacekeepers can feel existential boredom. And at , compares teaching MBAs to improv theater.
'Embrace uncertainty,' says Ruzic, 36, Assistant Professor of Economics.
'You might have a perfect script and a polished set of slides … and, within five minutes, someone derails it with a question about Bitcoin, Taylor Swift, or both. And that's when the real teaching begins.'
Today, P&Q proudly presents the 13th edition of our 40-Under-40 MBA Professors. Our goal remains unchanged: to identify and celebrate the most talented young professors currently teaching in MBA programs around the world.
Elena Fumagalli, INCAE Business School
The professors represent 39 different business schools, including 17 schools outside of the United States — more than in any other year. After the U.S., the United Kingdom has boasts seven professors, while Spain has three and France has two. The list also includes professors from Canada, China, Hong Kong, Denmark, and Costa Rica — home to .
Fumagalli, 38, discovered education's lasting impact from watching her mother, a devoted primary school teacher, interact with past students.
'Her students both feared and respected her, and I remember how meaningful it was for her to reconnect with them years later and see who they had become,' she tells P&Q. 'One story stayed with me: a girl once told my mom she wanted to be an astronaut and, years later, she studied aerospace engineering. That's the kind of legacy I've always admired.'
Today, the Associate Professor of Marketing and Leadership studies how emotions like loneliness, disgust, or overconfidence shape the way people spend money and make decisions. She also explores how behavioral science and neuroscience can improve leadership development and build more inclusive workplaces. She leads INCAE's Center for Inclusive and Sustainable Leadership and, in 2024, was the keynote speaker at the Forbes' 'Mujeres Poderosas Centroamérica' summit.
P&Q received more than 1,700 Best Professor nominations from MBA students, colleagues, business schools, and professors themselves. Our editorial staff evaluated each nominee on teaching (given a 70% weight) and research/business impact (given 30% weight).
For teaching, we considered both the quality and quantity of the nominations received. For example, if we received a hundred or more nominations with little substance for a single professor, they weren't as likely to score as highly as a professor who received a few in-depth and thoughtful nominations. We also considered any teaching-related awards the professors have won.
For research, we looked at the volume and impact of the professor's scholarly and professional work. To do this we examined Google Citation numbers as well as major media attention received by the professor and his or her research work. Lastly, akin to teaching, we considered research awards and grants the professors have received.
NEXT PAGE: Firsts, Youngests, Bests + Teaching the AI Generation
We love a good superlative at P&Q, and 2025 has several examples of the youngests, the firsts, and the rising stars.
At 28, , is the youngest honoree on this year's list.
The Assistant Professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at has already built the kind of career many could only dream of: During COVID-19, he contributed to one of the first AI applications to accelerate a large-scale clinical vaccine trial. He is a founding member of the AI in Drug Discovery, Development and Commercialization Consortium. And, he is winner of multiple research honors including the Innovative Applications in Analytics Award, the Edelman Laureate Award, and the Kuhn Award.
Michael Lingzhi Li, Harvard Business School
His students love him, at least judging by the couple of dozen nominations from MBAs and colleagues. Patrick Falzon, HBS MBA candidate, perhaps summed Li up best: 'Crazy good teacher on top of ridiculous accomplishments outside of the classroom, all while being younger than some of his students.'
, meanwhile, is the 2025 winner of the prestigious Fischer Black Prize, awarded biennially by the American Finance Association to a finance scholar under age 40 whose body of work demonstrates significant original research and relevance. Muir, 39, is the Donnalisa '86 and Bill Barnum Endowed Term Chair in Management at and Director of the Fink Center for Finance and Investment.
Talk about interesting juxtapositions: Muir tells P&Q he's currently reading 'The Dow Jones Averages 1885-1990' – 'a real page turner' – but also posts on his personal website.
And, , 37, Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship at The University of Chicago , won the 2023 Carlo Alberto Medal, a biennial prize given to the best Italian economist under 40. He also designed Booth's first MBA course on VC and PE in emerging markets.
Despite the U.S.' current political, um, situation – so long DEI, climate crisis mitigation, and the last remaining vestiges of international goodwill – many of 2025's professors continue to deploy business education in the service of people and planet.
Take and , both training MBAs to confront climate change in their future work. Yücel, 37, Associate Director of the Business of Sustainability Initiative at Georgetown University's , developed a likely first-of-its-kind course that focuses on the business case for sustainability, as opposed to the moral or ethical case. Students learn to evaluate emerging business models across wind, solar, energy storage, electric vehicles, and even carbon removal.
Bellon, 34, Assistant Professor of Finance at , is reshaping how business schools and capital markets think about climate risk. His dissertation, which won the UN PRI Best PhD Paper Award along with several other top honors, found that increasing the legal environmental liability of lenders can lead to better environmental practices by firms, all without tanking economic output.
Rita Mota, Esade Business School
And, at , , 39, prepares MBAs to lead with empathy, integrity, and systemic awareness. Her popular elective, Racial (In)justice, won her the MBA Teaching Excellence Award in 2024.
Mota is Esade's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Faculty Coordinator and an International Research Fellow at the Oxford University's Centre for Corporate Reputation. Her award-winning research explores corporate moral agency, human rights, digital ethics, and gender equity within an indigenous social enterprise in Mexico.
A lawyer by training, Mota for years has worked with the on the case, perhaps the biggest climate change case in the world. In 2017, six Portuguese youth sued 32 European governments following devastating wildfires that ravaged their country, arguing that insufficient governmental action infringed upon their fundamental human rights.
Mota transitioned to business academia when she realized the extent of the impact, both positive and negative, that businesses could have on people, communities, and the environment. 'I came to believe that real change could happen faster and more effectively through business than just through regulation,' she tells Poets&Quants.
As with our past 40-Under-40 lists, 2025's professors work at the cutting edge of business, technology, and the future of work. Many aren't just preparing students for a world powered by AI, they're actively building it.
At , Assistant Professor of Operations , 33, created Kai, the school's AI teaching assistant that now supports more than 1,000 students and 15 professors, responding to over 120,000 student queries per quarter. He's also built AI-driven case studies and co-leads a large-scale randomized trial to evaluate the impact of AI on education. The trial involves more than 50 professors and 40 universities.
Sébastien Martin, Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management
'I think we've barely scratched the surface of what genAI technology can do for education, and I'm incredibly excited about this,' Martin tells P&Q.
, 39, is also using AI to reshape education, but in the K12 space. The NBD Bancorp Assistant Professor of Technology and Operations at University of Michigan spent three years as a Teach For America corps member, teaching 9th grade math at KAPPA International High School in the Bronx. Now, as a business professor, she is studying how the hype of generative AI stacks up against reality for rank-and-file educators.
Across the Atlantic, explores how humans and machines can make better decisions together.
'When humans and AI form an 'ensemble', they often outperform either the manager or the AI working alone,' says Marchetti, 37, Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, who teaches LBS' first AI-based strategy elective.
'Each brings something valuable: the human offers experience, intuition, and gut feeling, while the AI contributes the power to process large datasets and model complex patterns.'
And, at in Spain, is developing a 'sociology of AI' approach to large language models to study how they interact, communicate, and even negotiate as if they were social entities. His team found that models developed their own intermediary languages that they are now starting to chart and understand.
'This insight opens new possibilities for business applications across industries. In our latest publication, we demonstrated that when properly tuned, these models can serve as effective negotiators, potentially transforming how organizations approach complex business transactions,' says Junqué de Fortuny, 38, Assistant Professor of Managerial Decision Sciences.
'Once we fully understand these mechanisms, the next phase is steering models toward more ethical and effective decision-making.'
NEXT PAGE: Presenting the 2025 40-Under-40 Best MBA Professors
Over the last decade, Poets&Quants has honored 520 up-and-coming star MBA professors as part of our 40-Under-40 honor roll. You can see past winners by clicking the year below:
2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2011
Nominations will open for the 2026 list next spring. Please keep an eye out at Poets&Quants.com as well as on our various newsletters and social media platforms for the start of our open nomination period.
Our full 2025 class of 40-Under-40 Best MBA Professors is presented below. Each winner filled out a P&Q questionnaire we hope reveals some insight into their backgrounds, teaching styles, and research. We asked about their hobbies, favorite music, and why they wanted to become business school professors.
We encourage you to read each profile by clicking the professor's name. Their answers are quite candid, surprisingly funny, and always insightful. We congratulate each man and woman on this year's list. No matter what they study, the courses they teach, or where they work, all are among the most promising young professors training the leaders of tomorrow.
Aleksander A. . Aleszczyk
Title: Assistant Professor of Accounting
Age: 34
New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business
Emmanouil Avgerinos
Title: Associate Professor of Decision Sciences
Age: 39
IE Business School
Aymeric Bellon
Title: Assistant Professor of Finance
Age: 34
University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School
Hayley Blunden
Title: Assistant Professor of Management
Age: 39
American University's Kogod School of Business
Emanuele Colonnelli
Title: Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship
Age: 37
University of Chicago's Booth School of Business
Kristen Duke
Title: Assistant Professor of Marketing
Age: 33
University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management
Elena Fumagalli
Title: Associate Professor of Marketing and Leadership
Age: 38
INCAE Business School
Negin (Nikki) Golrezaei
Title: W. Maurice Young (1961) Career Development Associate Professor of Management
Age: 39
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management
Christian Hampel
Title: Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation
Age: 36
Imperial Business School
Richard Hodgett
Title: Associate Professor in Business Analytics and Decision Sciences
Age: 39
Leeds University Business School
Enric Junqué de Fortuny
Title: Assistant Professor of Managerial Decision Sciences
Age: 38
IESE Business School at the University of Navarra
Samantha Keppler
Title: NBD Bancorp Assistant Professor of Technology and Operations
Age: 39
University of Michigan's Ross School of Business
Kristoph Kleiner
Title: Associate Professor of Finance
Age: 38
Indiana University's Kelley School of Business
Ryan Krause
Title: Professor of Strategy and Duncan Faculty Fellow
Age: 38
Texas Christian University's Neeley School of Business
Ravi S.. Kudesia
Title: Associate Professor of Management
Age: 38
Temple University's Fox School of Business
Ambar La Forgia
Title: Assistant Professor
Age: 36
University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business
Michael Lingzhi Li
Title: Assistant Professor
Age: 28
Harvard University's Harvard Business School
Ke Michael Mai
Title: Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour
Age: 39
China Europe International Business School
Arianna Marchetti
Title: Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Age: 37
London Business School
Sébastien Martin
Title: Assistant Professor of Operations
Age: 33
Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University
Rita Mota
Title: Associate Professor
Age: 39
Esade Business School
Tyler Muir
Title: Associate Professor of Finance
Age: 39
University of California Los Angeles' Anderson School of Management
Samir Nurmohamed
Title: Associate Professor of Management
Age: 39
The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania
Anthony Palomba
Title: Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Age: 38
University of Virginia's Darden School of Business
Voni Pamphile
Title: Associate Professor of Strategic Management and Public Policy
Age: 39
Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business
Jean Pauphilet
Title: Assistant Professor of Management Science and Operation
Age: 32
London Business School
Madeleine Rauch
Title: Associate Professor
Age: 36
The University of Cambridge's Cambridge Judge Business School
Ignacio Rios
Title: Assistant Professor of Operations Management
Age: 36
The University of Texas at Dallas Naveen Jindal School of Management
Francesco Rosati
Title: Associate Professor
Age: 39
Technical University of Denmark
Dimitrije Ruzic
Title: Assistant Professor of Economics
Age: 36
INSEAD
Anthony Salerno
Title: Associate Professor of Marketing
Age: 38
Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management
Sydney Scott
Title: Associate Professor of Marketing
Age: 34
WashU Olin
Raghav Singal
Title: Assistant Professor
Age: 33
Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College
Suhas A. Sridharan
Title: Associate Professor of Accounting
Age: 38
Emory University's Goizueta Business School
Irina Surdu-Nardella
Title: Professor of International Business Strategy
Age: 36
Warwick Business School
Ghassan Paul Yacoub
Title: Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation
Age: 39
EDHEC Business School
Tom Taiyi Yan
Title: Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior
Age: 33
University College London School of Management
Şafak Yücel
Title: Associate Professor of Operations Management
Age: 37
Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business
Laurina Zhang
Title: Associate Professor in Strategy & Innovation
Age: 39
Boston University's Questrom School of Business
Weiming Zhu
Title: Associate Professor in Innovation and Information Management
Age: 36
The University of Hong Kong Business School
The post Poets&Quants' World's Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors Of 2025 appeared first on Poets&Quants.