Modupe AkinolaSpeaker and Booking Agent Information

Modupe Akinola is an organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia Business School, where she holds the Barbara and David Zalaznick Professorship of Business and serves as Faculty Director of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics. Akinola grew up in Spanish Harlem as a second-generation African American. She earned a B.A.and M.A. in psychology, an M.B.A., and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Harvard University. Before academia, she worked at Bain & Company and Merrill Lynch and founded literacy and childcare initiatives in Ghana. Her research explores how workplace stress, triggered by deadlines, multitasking, and high-pressure environments, affects performance, creativity, decision-making, and negotiations. She also studies workforce diversity, biases in recruitment and retention of women and people of color, and strategies for building more inclusive organizations. Her work has appeared in top journals and media outlets, including The New York Times. She earned Columbia’s Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence and is recognized as an APS Fellow.