Susan Fournier

Susan Fournier, affiliated faculty with the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS), is Allen Questrom Professor and Dean of the Questrom School of Business at Boston University. She is the School’s first woman dean and its first academic dean in over 40 years.

Susan is in her 28th year as a marketing academic, 17 of these at Questrom. She held several leadership positions at the School including Senior Associate Dean for Faculty & Research and Director of the MBA and PhD Programs. Prior to Questrom, she served on the faculty at Harvard Business School and Dartmouth Tuck School.

With over 30,000 Google Scholar citations, Fournier ranks among the top 2% of researchers across all disciplines worldwide. She received five major research awards for her published works. She has authored 8 “home run” papers with over 1000 citations each; her transformational paper “Consumers and their Brands” has been cited 11,700 times. Earlier this year she received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in Consumer Psychology (2021), one of only 23 scholars holding this title.

Susan’s research explores shareholder value creation through branding, consumer-brand relationship development, brand risk, and person-brands.

In her deanship, she leads the school’s strategic emphasis on social impact through business, with focal initiatives including ESG measurements, impact investment, corporate governance of social responsibility, the social impact MBA, and the Institute for Business, Markets and Society.

Prior to her academic career, Susan served as VP at Young & Rubicam Advertising and in market research and management roles at Polaroid Corporation and Yankelovich Clancy Shulman.