Jonathan Weigel named one of the World’s Best 40-Under-40 Graduate Business Professors by Poets & Quants

Assistant Professor Jonathan Weigel, who teaches business ethics to MBA students and studies how fragile states can build more accountable governance, has been named one of Poets & Quants’ “World’s Best 40-Under-40 Graduate Business Professors of 2026.”

Weigel was selected from more than 1,700 nominations from students, administrators, and faculty members at business schools around the world. Nominees were evaluated on teaching, research, and business impact.

Weigel has taught the core MBA course Ethics and Responsibility in Business since joining Haas in 2021. In his classes, he draws on more than a decade of fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—where he has spent years running large-scale experiments on taxation and governance in one of the world’s most fragile urban settings. He also served as Faculty Director of the Center for Responsible Business at UC Berkeley Haas and leads judging for the Haas Sustainable Business Research Prize.

“What I enjoy most about teaching business students is the diversity of experience in the room,” Weigel says. “A student who has worked in conflict zones, another who has run a startup, and another who spent a decade in finance all bring different moral intuitions—and those differences are the raw material of the best discussions.”

In his research, Weigel founded ODEKA, a nonprofit that conducts large-scale randomized controlled trials embedded in the DRC’s provincial tax system. The organization employs more than 100 staff and contractors. His work—which has spanned the DRC, Myanmar, Haiti, and Nepal—has been published in leading journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the American Economic Review. He was awarded UC Berkeley’s 2025 Philomathia Prize for exceptional promise as an early-career faculty member.

“I suppose I do research in places where not many business professors work. But with extreme poverty increasingly concentrated in fragile states, I don’t think we can afford to neglect these countries,” Weigel said. “I find running ODEKA—working with and learning from my Congolese partners—to be the most rewarding part of my job.”

This is the 14th year that Poets & Quants has published its 40-Under-40 list, now expanded to include faculty teaching across all graduate business programs—from MiMs to specialized master’s degrees. This year’s honorees represent 38 schools across 11 countries.

Read the full Poets & Quants profile of Jonathan Weigel.