Our Team

Anita M. McGahan is University Professor and George E. Connell Chair in
Organizations and Society at the University of Toronto. Her primary appointments are
at the Rotman School of Management and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public
Policy. She is cross appointed to the Medical School and the Dalla Lana School of
Public Health, and is affiliated at the School of Cities, the School of Pharmacy’s W.H.O.
Centre, Massey College, and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and
Society. Professor McGahan is also Senior Associate at the Institute for Strategy and
Competitiveness at Harvard University; is the Chief Economist in the Division of Global
Health Innovation at the Massachusetts General Hospital; and is a past President of the
Academy of Management. From 2014 to 2019, she was a faculty member of the
MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance. During her 2010-
2015 appointment as the Director of Toronto’s PhD Program and as the Associate Dean
of Research, the School’s PhD and research rankings internationally increased from
#11 to #4 and #17 to #3, respectively.

McGahan earned both her PhD and AM at Harvard University in two years. She holds
an MBA from the Harvard Business School, where she received highest academic
honors as a Baker Scholar, and a BA from Northwestern University, where she was
elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She also spent several years at both McKinsey & Company and Morgan Stanley & Company and was previously on the faculties of both Harvard Business School and Boston University. She has visited the Stanford Graduate School
of Business, the London Business School, the Australian Graduate School of
Management, the University of Cambridge, and the Division of Social Medicine and
Global Health at Harvard Medical School.

McGahan’s credits include four books and over 175 articles, case studies, notes and
other published material on competitive advantage, industry evolution, and global
health. Her current research emphasizes entrepreneurship in the public interest and
innovative collaboration between public and private organizations. She is also pursuing
a long-standing interest in how firms overcome industry disruption to achieve
breakthrough performance. Her recent work emphasizes innovation in the governance
of technology to improve global health. McGahan has been recognized as a master
teacher for her dedication to the success of junior faculty and for her leadership in
course development. In 2010, she was awarded the Academy of Management BPS
Division’s Irwin Distinguished Educator Award. In 2012, the Academy conferred on
McGahan its Career Distinguished Educator Award for her championship of reform in
the core curriculum of Business Schools, and in 2021, the Academy conferred on McGahan its Career Distinguished Service Award for leadership in the Academy and
other organizations. In 2018, McGahan was awarded both the Inaugural Educational
Impact Award and, with Michael E. Porter, the Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper
Prize from the Strategic Management Society. With doctoral student Leandro
Pongeluppe, she was awarded the Glueck Best Paper Award in 2021 from the
Academy of Management. In 2012 she was elected a Fellow of the Strategic
Management Society, and in 2015 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of
Management.

McGahan currently teaches several courses at the University of Toronto: the Strategy
core to MBA candidates at the Rotman School of Management; Entrepreneurship in the
Physiology Department of the Medical School; and Grand Challenges, which is an
interdisciplinary course offered to students in Engineering, Public Health, Medicine,
Management, Global Affairs, and Law. McGahan is also a faculty mentor in the Reach
program, which is an interdisciplinary initiative through which students from all over the
University study and conduct field research on the challenge of reaching the world’s
most vulnerable and distant populations with essential services, such as vaccines, birth
registrations, bank accounts, and electricity.