Kristina McElheran is a tenured Associate Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management. Trained in managerial economics and strategy, she studies how digital technologies reshape firm performance and the nature of work. Her research spans multiple waves of digitization—from the commercial internet and cloud computing to newer AI-based technologies—and has appeared in leading journals including Management Science, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, and the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, as well as widely read outlets such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Communications of the ACM, and The Economist, and other major media in the U.S. and Canada.

Before joining the University of Toronto, McElheran spent six years on the Harvard Business School faculty, where she developed a nuanced lens on strategy execution and process design. Formative experiences at two early-stage Silicon Valley startups add a practitioner’s perspective on decision-making under uncertainty, innovation in real organizational contexts, and what emerging technologies can mean for society.

She is a Fellow at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, as well as a Faculty Fellow at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society in Toronto. She is also a full member of the Acceleration Consortium at the University of Toronto, an interdisciplinary initiative advancing the use of AI and automation to accelerate scientific discovery. She serves as a Lab Economist at the Creative Destruction Lab, a global startup program for seed-stage science-based companies founded at the University of Toronto. She is a frequent speaker to academic, industry, and policy audiences, bringing evidence to active debates on digital transformation and the future of work.

McElheran received her PhD from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University.