Dr. Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. A behavioral scientist and author, Dr. Aaker is a leading expert on how purpose and meaning shape the choices individuals make, how money and time can be used in ways that cultivate long-lasting happiness, and how technology can positively impact human well-being. She is widely published in leading scientific journals and her work has been featured in The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Science. Dr. Aaker co-authored the award-winning book, The Dragonfly Effect, which has been translated into over 10 languages, as well as The Power of Story, which drew on behavioral science to provide a hands-on tool to help companies put The Dragonfly Effect model to work. In a real world model implementation, she worked with a group of Stanford students to get over 100,000 people into the bone marrow registry, a target that they achieved in under one year. She is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award, Stanford Distinguished Teaching Award, Citibank Best Teacher Award, George Robbins Best Teacher Award, Robert Jaedicke Silver Apple Award, and the MBA Professor of the Year Award.
Dr. Aaker is a highly sought-after speaker on the application of behavioral science to help companies and leaders positively impact human well-being through technology, business practices, story, and purpose-driven leadership. At Stanford, she teaches classes including Designing AI to Cultivate Human Well-Being, Rethinking Purpose, A New Type of Leader, VR/AR: Scaling Empathy in an Immersive World, Power of Story, and Humor: Serious Business. Dr. Aaker serves as a board member and advisor to early-stage companies, family foundations, and large organizations with the goal to help companies and leaders understand and address digital transformation, global brand building and how to embrace a new type of leadership for the innovation economy – one anchored on purpose, fueled by levity.
Before joining Stanford University, Aaker was a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management where she conducted the research that resulted in her seminal paper, Dimensions of Brand Personality. She completed her PhD degrees at Stanford University, and holds a BA from UC Berkeley. More personally, she is an early adopter of the trailblazing “family sabbatical” practice, by which she “moves” her family to far-flung locations in an effort to teach her kids to be citizens of the world. They have yet to express enthusiasm about this practice but almost certainly will before she dies. In terms of personal accomplishments, she counts winning a dance-off in the early 1980s among her most impressive feats; and her abbreviated cooking skills have earned her family Doordash Platinum status.
