Kellogg professors named Poets&Quants Best Under 40
May 18, 2026 – Poets&Quants has named two Kellogg School of Management professors in its “World's Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors of 2026” list, recognizing Professors William Brady and Jacob Teeny as academic leaders who combine research and business results with innovative teaching.
The recognition of Brady and Teeny continues a longstanding tradition of teaching excellence at Kellogg. Over the past decade, Poets&Quants’ 40-Under-40 MBA Professors list has honored Kellogg faculty members across disciplines including operations, management, finance, accounting, strategy, and tech:
- 2025: Sébastien Martin
- 2024: Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Sean Higgins
- 2023: Hatim Rahman
- 2022: Ivuoma Onyeador
- 2021: Aaron Yoon and Amanda Starc
- 2020: Maryam Kouchaki
- 2019: Dashun Wang
- 2018: Nour Kteily
- 2017: David Matsa and Loran Nordgren
2026 Honoree Profiles
William Brady is an assistant professor of management and organizations. His research examines how human psychology interacts with new technologies in ways that shape emotion, morality and intergroup behavior. Brady’s goal is to design person-centered interventions that improve digital and social interactions. He combines behavioral experiments, big data analytics and natural language processing to study emotion at the social network level and its consequences for group behavior.
With a background in social and moral psychology, Brady has spent years studying how people navigate intractable conflicts, where each side sees the world in fundamentally different ways. Lessons taken from such resolutions translate in a unique and surprisingly effective way to teach negotiations. Brady pulls back the curtain on the psychology behind where people get stuck, ensuring his students never do.
Brady’s research has been published in leading academic journals including Science, Nature Human Behavior, PNAS, Science Advances and Perspectives on Psychological Science. His work has been covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Wired, Scientific American, BBC, a U.S. Senate Commerce Committee hearing and more.
“It's a great honor to be recognized for both sides of the work as a professor,” Brady says. “Research lets you push ideas into the broader conversation and hopefully shape how society thinks about a problem, but teaching is where the impact is more observable. Teaching negotiations is especially rewarding — you get to watch students apply concepts directly to their own situations, whether it's a job offer or a promotion, and see real value come out of bringing theory and scientific findings into their lives. That moment where the research meets an individual application is what makes the job meaningful!”
Jake Teeny is an associate professor of marketing who brings the science of influence directly into the classroom. He uses one of persuasion’s most powerful tools — narrative transportation — to structure every class as a story. Students learn psychological frameworks to approach real brand challenges, where the real-world resolution lands like a final act.
Beyond MBA students, he trains audiences from U.S. Marines to corporate executives on how to apply the science of persuasion to their most pressing communication challenges. From the lecture hall to the laboratory to the boardroom, Teeny is the person people turn to when they want to understand how influence works — and where it’s headed in the AI era.
Teeny has published research in JPSP, Nature, PNAS, Psychological Science and the Journal of Marketing, amassing over 1,179 Google Scholar citations while in his sixth year on faculty. He also co-edited the first academic handbook on personalized persuasion, authored the most-cited paper on AI and personalized influence, and co-wrote a TIME magazine op-ed regarding its risks.
“In academia, there can be a lot of ambiguity about what real success looks like,” says Teeny. “Is that published paper good enough? Did your students really learn the material? So winning this award means a lot. It feels like a reassuring signal in the noise that my research and my impact in the classroom matter. And that I must owe a few students some beers for nominating me.”
The full list of honorees can be found on Poets&Quants.
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