Distinguished Fellows

Opher Baron is a University of Toronto Distinguished Professor of Operations Management at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and a cofounder and CEO of SiMLQ.

He was a visiting associate Professor at the Industrial engineering and Management faculty of Technion (2009/10) and a visiting Professor at the School of Information Management and Engineering, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (2016/17). He is a Distinguished Fellow at the School of Business Administration at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2025/26). Opher served as the Academic Director, MMA Program (2021/23), and the Operations management and statistics area coordinator (2015/21). He has a PhD in Operations Management from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an MBA and BSc in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Technion. On the teaching front, Opher is especially proud of the modeling and analytics courses he introduced and teaches at Rotman. On the application front he and his colleagues launched the Covidppehelp.ca platform that facilitated the flow of millions of PPE items to end-user customers during the global Covid19 pandemic. In 2024 he cofounded SiMLQ Inc. see WWW.SiMLQ.com. SiMLQ automatically constructs data-driven process Simulators (digital twins) by leveraging event log data, Machine Learning and Queueing theory. On the theory side, Opher’s research interests include queueing, business analytics, service operations (such as healthcare), autonomous vehicles, and supply chain management. Opher's work is published in leading journals such as Operations Research, and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and he has won several research and teaching awards and grants, including the 1000 Talents Plan Scholar from the Shanghai Municipal Government, 2017 and the Rotman 2023 Distinguished Scholarly Contribution Award. Opher is active in the operations research and operations management community. He has given numerous invited keynote lectures and seminars, chaired several conferences, clusters, and sessions, and is currently serving on the advisory board and editorial boards of several leading journals, including Operations Research, and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.

Brian S. Silverman is Professor of Strategic Management, and holds the J.R.S. Prichard and Ann Wilson Chair in Management. He has previously served as Associate Dean, Research & Academic Resources.

His research focuses on the ways in which a firm’s competitive strategy and organizational structure interact to affect its performance – in particular, its ability to access and exploit technological capabilities. He studies diverse industries including biotechnology, information processing, consumer electronics, and transportation. He has served in numerous roles in varied academic organizations. He is currently a Co-Editor at Strategic Management Journal, serves on the editorial boards of California Management Review and Strategic Organization, and is a former Series Editor of Advances in Strategic Management.

Heski Bar-Isaac, FREcon, is the University of Toronto Distinguished Professor of Economics & Finance at the Rotman School of Management. He teaches graduate courses in managerial economics, game theory, and industrial organization.

He is a board member of the Industrial Organization Society, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and an associate of CRESSE, a network of academics and professionals with an interest in competition policy and regulation. He currently serves as an editor of the Economic Journal and as an associate editor of the RAND Journal of Economics. He has previously served on the Scientific Council of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE) and held various editorial positions.

In 2024–25, he was a visiting Special Economic Advisor on Digital and Platform Markets at the Competition Bureau Canada.

Jeffrey L. Callen is the Inaugural Rotman Chair in Accounting. His research interests include corporate valuation, accounting information and capital markets, efficiency measurement and the economics of the non-profit firm.

He is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance, a former editor of Contemporary Accounting Research and a former co-editor of the International Journal of Auditing. Currently he is an editor of the Multinational Finance Journal and an editor of the Journal of Law, Finance and Accounting. He served for many years on the editorial board of The Accounting Review. He is currently on the editorial boards Contemporary Accounting Research and the China Journal of Accounting Research, and the ARN and FEN networks. He is also the current president of the Multinational Finance Society.

Daniel Trefler is the Chair in Competitiveness and Prosperity at the Rotman School of Management, a Senior Research Fellow at the NBER and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Professor Trefler is known for his path-breaking contributions to fundamental research and his ongoing contributions to public policy debates surrounding inequality, innovation, AI and trade agreements. He has advised extensively on productivity, CETA, NAFTA, the WTO, managing Canada’s relationships with the US and China, and international regulation of AI.

The importance of Professor Trefler’s work has been recognized through numerous distinctions including the 2016 Killam Prize in Social Sciences (Canada’s ‘Nobel Prize’), the 2016 Bank of Canada Fellowship Award, and the Canada Research Chair. Internationally, his distinctions include the 2011 Ohlin Lecturer (Sweden) and invited public lectures from Harvard to Tsinghua. His work has been cited by The New York Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist.

On the research side, Professor Trefler studies the effects of international trade—both positive (productivity, innovation) and negative (inequality, job loss). His first wave of research (1990s) challenged prevailing trade models, showing they conflicted with observed patterns in technology and inequality. His solution is now standard in undergraduate and PhD curricula. In the 2000s, he pioneered testing of the ‘New International Trade’ emphasizing firm-level capabilities over national comparative advantage. His quantification of how trade agreements affect productivity, innovation, and inequality, has been cited by Ministers and Prime Ministers. His third wave (2010s) explored how trade shapes civil society, including constitutional structures and elite influence. The fourth and current wave examines AI’s impacts on trade and society.

On the policy side, Professor Trefler has demonstrated a deep and ongoing desire to better Canada. He has advised Global Affairs Canada on CETA, FDI, CUSMA renegotiations, China, and most recently WTO revitalization. His guidance on international AI regulation has been sought by the WTO, OECD, the Royal Society (UK), and the National Academy of Sciences (USA). In Canada, he advises the Bank of Canada on trade, served on Ontario’s Task Force on Competitiveness, Productivity, and Economic Progress, and sits on C.D. Howe’s International Economic Policy Advisory Council as well as its new Trade Crisis Working Group. His work on children earned him the Noni MacDonald Award from the Canadian Paediatric Society.

Professor Trefler has supervised over 20 PhDs who now shape research and policy at leading universities and international organizations worldwide.

Ezra Zuckerman Sivan is  the Alvin J. Siteman (1948) Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship. He is also cofounder of MIT Sloan's PhD Program in Economic Sociology.

Zuckerman Sivan is an economic sociologist whose research focuses on showing how an understanding of fundamental social processes is important for shedding light on key issues in business and management, as well as how an appreciation for the dynamics of business and management inform our understanding of fundamental social processes.  He is perhaps best known for demonstrating the importance of categorical structures in shaping valuation in various markets.  

Zuckerman Sivan's master's and executive level teaching centers on competitive and technology strategy, and he teaches two doctoral courses, "Sociology of Strategy" and "Identity and Action."

He holds a BA in political science from Columbia University as well as an MA and a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago.

Batia Wiesenfeld, Andre J.L. Koo Professor of Management, is also the Director of the Business and Society Program at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

She is an expert on the effective management of organizational change across industries and sectors. She studies how technology changes the future of work and organizations, and how to manage employee and stakeholder reactions to layoffs, restructuring, remote work, and stigmatizing crises. Currently, much of her work focuses on how new AI/ML and digital health technologies are changing healthcare work and healthcare organizations, and how these technologies can be used for equity, upskilling, and at scale. Her work is multi-method, incorporating surveys, experiments, archival data analysis, interviews and observation. She is also an expert on theories of organizational identification, fairness, and construal level.

A former editor of Organization Science, she serves or served on multiple editorial boards including Administrative Science Quarterly and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, served on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Management, and has received several large grants to support her work, including from the National Science Foundation. Batia received her PhD in Management from Columbia Business School, serves as an executive coach, and consults to senior leadership in a variety of organizations.

Bernd Skiera received his doctoral degree in 1995 and his habilitation in 1999 from the University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany.,He is a Professor of electronic commerce at the Faculty of Business and Economics, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany, where he is also the Director of the E-Finance Lab at the House of Finance.

His publications appeared in, among others, Management Science, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, and European Journal of Operational Research. His research interests include prediction markets, electronic commerce, online marketing, and pricing.

Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare, and Professor of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is also Site Lead at the Creative Destruction Lab-Toronto, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Distinguished Fellow at the School of Business Administration at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a research lead at Acceleration Consortium.

A former Senior Editor at Marketing Science, his research focuses on the economics of digital technology and artificial intelligence. He has published academic articles in marketing, computing, law, management, medicine, physics, political science, public health, statistics, and economics. His work on online advertising won the INFORMS Society of Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award, and he testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on competition and privacy in digital advertising. Avi received his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University. He co-authored the bestselling books Prediction Machines and Power and Prediction, both on the economics of artificial intelligence.

Herman Aguinis is the Avram Tucker Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Management at The George Washington University School of Business, where he served as Chair of the Department of Management and Director of the Master of Human Resources Management Program.

His work focuses on the global acquisition and deployment of talent in organizations and organizational research methods (i.e., behavioral science and data science). Every year since 2018 (for the 7th consecutive year), Web of Science Highly Cited Researchers Reports has ranked him among the world’s 100 most impactful researchers in Economics and Business, he served as President of the Academy of Management, and has been inducted into The PhD Project Hall of Fame. Before joining GWU, he was the John F. Mee Chair of Management and the Founding and Managing Director of the Institute for Global Organizational Effectiveness at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University.

Regina Wittenberg-Moerman specializes in debt contracting and trading, banking, reporting quality, disclosure and developing economies. She has held positions at the Wharton School, the Chicago Booth and the University of Southern California.
Wittenberg-Moerman is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Best Paper Prize by the Journal of Accounting and Economics and Dean’s Award for Research Excellence from USC Marshall. Wittenberg-Moerman is the senior editor of the Journal of Accounting Research. She also served on the editorial board of the Journal of Accounting and Economics and the Journal of Accounting Research and is a referee for numerous journals, including The Accounting Review, Review of Accounting Studies, Journal of Finance and Journal of Financial Economics.

Michele Gelfand is the John H. Scully Professor of Cross-Cultural Management and Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business School and Professor of Psychology by Courtesy.

Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences. She has published in Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature, among other outlets. Her work has been cited over 60,000 times (H index= 94) and has been discussed on CNN, the NY Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe. Her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World was published by Scribner in 2018. She is the Past President of the International Association for Conflict Management and Division Chair of the Conflict Division of the Academy of Management. Gelfand is a fellow of AOM, SESP, IACCP, and IACM, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She lives in Palo Alto with her husband Todd Betke and has 2 daughters, Jeanette and Hannah. 

an affiliate of the Columbia Data Science Institute, and the author of Decisions over Decimals. Professor Netzer is a world-renowned expert in data-driven decision-making and extracting meaningful insights from data. He wrote dozens of papers published in the top tier academic journals. His award-winning research is broadly read and highly cited. He is an award winning teacher at Columbia Business School's MBA, Executive MBA and Executive Education programs.

Andrew Ellul is Professor of Finance and Fred T. Greene Chair in Finance at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.

He joined Indiana University after completing his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests focus on institutional investors’ trading and risk management, empirical corporate finance, labor and finance and market microstructure. He is an Editor of the Review of Finance, the journal of the European Finance Association, a Research Associate of Centre for Economic Policy Research, Center for Studies of Economics and Finance, European Corporate Governance Institute, Systemic Risk Centre and Financial Markets Group and serves on the organization committees of the leading finance conferences. His research has been accepted for publication by the leading finance and economics journals, including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and the American Economic Review, and presented at the top finance conferences in the US and internationally. Andrew has received awards for both teaching and research, specifically the Morgan Stanley Equity Market Microstructure Award, the European Finance Association’s Best Paper Award, the Best Paper Award at the Financial Management Association’s Annual Meeting, and the Europlace Institute of Finance Award. Andrew is also a member of the European Central Bank’s Task Force for the implementation of IFRS 9 by European banks. He teaches courses in corporate finance and investment analysis at the undergraduate, graduate (MBA) and PhD levels and has won several teaching awards.