Modupe Akinola

In 2018, Akinola became the first Black professor in Columbia Business School's history to earn tenure. In 2020, she became Faculty Director of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School.

Upon earning a Ph.D. in 2009, Akinola joined the faculty of Columbia Business School. She has taught the core required leadership course for first-year MBAs and lectures in several executive education programs on topics including: leadership development, stress management, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is one of the most highly rated business school professors at Columbia Business School and received Columbia Business School's Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2015.

Akinola has received numerous awards and honors for her research including Best Graduate Student Paper Award, Society of Personality and Social Psychology (2009), Rising Star Award, Association for Psychological Science (2011), and the Best Paper Award, Academy of Management Journal (2020). She has been named a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Fellow (2013), Society for Personality and Social Psychology Fellow (2021), an Association for Psychological Science Fellow (2020), and was included on the Thinkers50 Radar List of 30 Thinkers to Watch (2022).

Akinola completed a B.A. in psychology, magna cum laude, at Harvard University in 1996. She earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 2001. She returned to Harvard University in 2004 where she earned an M.A. in social psychology in 2006 and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior in 2009, receiving the Wyss Award of Excellence in Doctoral Research at graduation.

Modupe Nyikoale Akinola (born April 22, 1974) is an American organizational scholar and social psychologist who examines the science of stress, creativity, and how to maximize human potential in diverse organizations. She is currently the Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, where she is the Director of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics.

Akinola is a first-generation African American and New Yorker who grew up in Spanish Harlem. Her parents were born and raised in West Africa (Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo), immigrating to the U.S. in the late 1960s. She describes her father, a retired hospital-care investigator, and her mother, a retired teacher, as “African hippies” who believed wholeheartedly in the power of education as a great equalizer. She and her two sisters attended The Brearley School, a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She credits her early experiences growing up in a predominantly Black environment but attending a predominantly White and educationally rigorous school as critical in shaping her interest in understanding the science of stress and the dynamics of diversity.