O’Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration and Hellman Faculty Fellow in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit, Harvard Business School
A scientist, teacher, entrepreneur, musician, and mother of three small-but-relentless conversationalists, Alison Wood Brooks is the O’Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. An award-winning teacher (recently named Best 40-under-40 Professor by Poets & Quants), Professor Brooks was named an American Psychological Society Rising Star in 2017, serves as a member of the Harvard Behavioral Insights Group, and Faculty Recruiting Chair of the Negotiation, Organization, and Markets Unit.
Her research on the science of conversation has been published in many prestigious academic journals like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Psychological Science, as well as in popular media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The New York Times, Scientific American, Harvard Business Review, and podcasts like Choiceology with Katy Milkman and Against the Rules with Michael Lewis. She presents her research at industry and academic conferences around the world, serves as an invited speaker at top universities, and works with industry partners like Gong, Google, Balto, Facebook AI, the Boston Celtics, and as a consulting advisor for start-up ventures. Her over-subscribed MBA course (TALK: How to talk gooder in business and life) has been adapted at other business schools and turned into an intensive program for executive education at HBS (Communicating for Impact). Her first book, TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves (Crown) will launch January 2025.
Education
A.B., Princeton University
Ph.D., The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania