Claudine Madras Gartenberg

“I will always feel a part of the HBS community. I feel very close to my fellow alumni as well as to the faculty within my department.”

I was a Physics undergraduate at Harvard and worked every summer at Los Alamos in New Mexico doing astrophysics. When I graduated, I decided to take a few years before graduate school to work in a non-academic job. I moved to San Francisco and joined a small firm doing technology consulting for energy companies. I thought I would stay for two years and ended up staying for seven, loving the leadership and mental challenge of helping run a business during a full business cycle. Once I returned for my MBA at HBS, I discovered business academia and learned that I could get the best of both worlds: I could return to academia and still study topics that I loved. I applied to the DBA program in Strategy during the fall of my second year as an MBA and began the program immediately after graduation.

My research interests

I am very interested in corporate strategy and how seemingly sensible strategies can introduce tremendous incentive conflicts within organizations. I saw these types of conflicts within my own firm prior to graduate school, as well as within my client firms as they attempted to manage related businesses that involved very different types of internal organization. For my DBA, I studied this phenomenon within financial firms that issued mortgages during the period preceding the financial crisis in 2008.

After HBS

I will be starting as an assistant professor at NYU Stern School of Business in the fall, teaching corporate strategy and continuing to pursue my research interests. I will always feel a part of the HBS community. I feel very close to my fellow alumni as well as to the faculty within my department.

Advice for prospective HBS doctoral students

Find research areas that interest academics but also have the potential for real impact on the business world. This is much harder said than done, but in the end, if our research speaks only to other academics, what good is it?

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