Affiliation: University of Minnesota
Bio: Srilata Zaheer (Sri) is the Dean of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, and has served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis since 2017, and as Chair since 2020.
Sri holds the Elmer L. Andersen Chair in Global CSR at the Carlson School. She has published extensively on international management, and her work on the liability of foreignness has become required reading in doctoral programs worldwide. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business and is on the Societal Impact Advisory Committee of JIBS, where she has also served as Reviewing Editor. Sri has been involved in multiple capacities at AIB, from helping organize the Minneapolis program to running consortia and serving on award committees. In 2018, Zaheer received the Eminent Scholar Award for lifetime achievement from the Academy of Management IM Division.
During her tenure as dean, Sri introduced several new degree programs, including with Tsinghua and Tongji Universities, adding to the Carlson School’s global degree programs in Austria with WU and in Guangzhou with Sun Yat-sen University. Sri raised over $220 million in philanthropy, including $12+ million to support study abroad scholarships. Sri currently serves on the international academic councils of the Warsaw School of Economics, the Korea University Business School, and a new business school in Chennai, and also served on the founding Academic Council of ISB in Hyderabad.
As Chair of the Minneapolis Fed, Sri has been deeply involved in discussions and decisions around the Fed’s handling of the pandemic and inflation. It has brought her full circle from her early work on “acceptable risk” in US and Japanese Banks, which received dissertation awards from both AIB and AOM. She has served on the board of GMAC, and led many accreditation visits for AACSB, and as a result, has gotten to know b-school deans around the world.
Born in India, Sri did her BSc in Chennai, and her MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, where she met her husband, Aks. After working for multinationals including TCS and Sandoz in India, Sri moved to Nigeria for five years, where she was inspired to become an academic as a faculty member at the Rivers State University of Science and Technology in Port Harcourt. That led to a PhD from the Sloan School at MIT, and a career in Minnesota, but Sri still can’t make marshmallow salad, although she can produce a mean curry!
Last Updated: May 2023