Jacob Cohen

Jake Cohen is the Associate Dean of Global EMBA and Executive Education and Clinical Professor of Accounting and Business Law at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Prior to joining Kellogg, Jake was Senior Associate Dean and Senior Lecturer in Accounting, Ethics, and Law at the MIT Sloan School of Management. As Senior Associate Dean and a member of the school’s leadership team, he served as an ambassador for MIT Sloan, working to maintain and expand relationships at MIT, and support existing and new strategic global partnerships.

At MIT, Jake was an active partner to the Office of External Relations, specifically on philanthropic initiatives and key school relationships. He served as a member of the MIT Risk Advisory Committee and was MIT Sloan’s Title IX Officer. As faculty, he directed the Master of Science in Management Studies (MSMS) degree program and served as Faculty Director for some of MIT Sloan’s largest and most complex custom executive education programs, including the MIT Sloan – Tsinghua Program, the McKinsey Financial Executive Leadership Program, and a program for the US Federal Government.

Jake was a member of the Board of Governors and the Executive Committee of the Asia School of Business (ASB), MIT Sloan’s largest global partner, based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. During the 2022-2023 academic year, Jake served as interim CEO, President, and Dean of ASB and Professor of Management Practice. Thereafter, he served as a Senior Advisor to ASB and its President.

From 2012 until 2023, Jake served as Senior Associate Dean for the Undergraduate and Masters Programs and played a critical role in building MIT Sloan’s portfolio of degree programs. Jake also oversaw MIT Sloan’s Sustainability Initiative and the MIT Leadership Center.

Prior to joining MIT, from 2008 to 2011, Jake was the Dean of the MBA Program at INSEAD, directing strategy and operations for the school’s campuses in France, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi. He also oversaw partnerships with Wharton and launched new collaborations with the Kellogg School of Management, Johns Hopkins University, and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. 

Before taking on the role of Dean, Jake served as the Director of the INSEAD-PwC Research Initiative on High Performance Organizations, INSEAD’s largest research center. At INSEAD, he was founder, director, and professor of the INSEAD’s Business Foundations Program, as well as Affiliate Professor of Accounting & Control and Business Law. Since joining the school in 2003, Jake focused his research on corporate governance, publishing dozens of INSEAD cases, as well as a textbook on Global Financial Reporting and Analysis.

From 1999 to 2003, Jake was a Senior Teaching Fellow at Harvard Business School in the Accounting & Management Group where he taught in the Analytics program, the MBA program, and in the Executive Education programs. He published dozens of Harvard Business School cases on accounting and corporate governance. 

Jake also has industry experience in the financial sector, having worked as an accountant at KPMG in Philadelphia, and as a mergers & acquisition consultant for PwC in New York City. Leveraging his extensive business and management experience, he has consulted for a number of organizations including: Accenture, Aetna, ArcelorMittal, Bain, BCG, Blackstone, Blumberg Capital, BMO Capital, and many others. From 2021 through 2023, he served as the Audit Committee Chairperson of a NYSE publicly traded company.

Building on his expertise and passion for global perspectives, Jake has served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School (UK), the University of Oxford Saïd Business School (UK), the University of Oxford Smith School of the Environment (UK), LUISS Business School (Italy), Asia School of Business (Malaysia), INSEAD (France, Singapore, Abu Dhabi), the University of Toronto Law School (Canada), the University of Toronto Rotman Business School (Canada), the Lomonosov Moscow State University Business School (Russia), and Tsinghua University Schwarzman Scholars College (China) and was recognized for outstanding teaching.  

Jake holds a Juris Doctor in corporate law from Syracuse University, a Master of Science in accounting from Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, and a Bachelor of Science in accounting from Lehigh University. He completed six executive certificates in finance at Harvard Business School, the AVIRA certificate for senior executives at INSEAD, and the Leader to Leader (L2L) program, MIT’s senior leadership development program.