About the faculty

Brian Golden is the academic director for the OMA Physician Leadership Program and is the Sandra Rotman chaired professor in health sector strategy at the Rotman School of Management, the University of Toronto and the University Health Network (UHN). He is the founding academic director of the Sandra Rotman Centre for Health Sector Strategy, a policy, research and leadership development institute. His research has informed policy around collaborative leadership, system design, funding models and primary care.

As an adviser and director of leadership development programs, Golden has worked with a variety of organizations, including the Canadian Medical Association, provincial and territorial medical associations, Canadian provincial governments, Britain’s National Health Service, several Local Integration Health Networks and hospitals and agencies, including the Hospital for Sick Children, UHN, Hamilton Health Sciences, London Health Science Centre, Sunnybrook College Health Sciences Centre, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, British Columbia Cancer Agency, Cancer Care Ontario, the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Baylor Medical Center. Private-sector clients include Tieto (Finland), General Electric and Baxter. He is the founding academic director of the Rotman School’s Advanced Health Leadership Program and the Global Executive MBA in Healthcare and Life sciences. Golden was the founding director of the Judy Project, Canada’s premier program for senior women leaders in the private and public sectors.

Nouman Ashraf is an assistant professor, teaching stream, within the organizational behaviour and human resources management area at the Rotman School of Management. He possesses a broad range of professional, academic and research interests, with a specialized focus on enabling innovative and inclusive practices within organization life. For the last decade and a half, he has held progressively senior roles at the University of Toronto. He is a recognized thought leader in governance and has taught thousands of directors in the national Rotman program on not-for-profit governance in partnership with the Institute for Corporate Directors since its inception in 2007.

An award-winning faculty member, Nouman teaches emancipatory leadership within the executive MBA as well as the OMNIUM Global Executive MBA Program, leading social innovation within the two- and three-year MBA programs, and leading across differences within the Rotman Commerce Program. He is the academic director of various custom leadership programs in partnership with Rotman Executive Program clients. His previous consulting clients include Telus, Cliffs Natural Resources, Bayer, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, United Way Toronto and numerous post-secondary and health-care institutions.

At lunchtime, he can be found at Massey College within the University of Toronto, where he mentors exceptional post-graduate students in his capacity as senior fellow.

Maja Djikic, PhD, is an associate professor and the director of Self-Development Laboratory at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

She is a psychologist specializing in the field of personality development. Her work examines the effect of art on personality and means of developing a congruent and flexible self. She has been a post-doctoral fellow with the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking at Rotman School of Management, and the psychology department at Harvard University.

She has published more than 30 articles and book chapters in the area of personality development in journals such as Psychological Science, Journal of Research in Personality, Creativity Research Journal, New Ideas in Psychology, etc. Her research has been featured in the New York Times, Salon, Slate, the Scientific American Mind and many other media outlets.

Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman chair in artificial intelligence and health and a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is the chief data scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute and the Schwartz-Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Avi is also a scientific leadership team member at Acceleration Consortium. Avi’s research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy.

Along with Ajay Agrawal and Joshua Gans, Avi is the author of the bestselling books Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence and Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence.

He has published academic articles in marketing, statistics, law, management, medicine, political science, refugee studies, physics, computing and economics. Avi is a former senior editor at Marketing Science. His work on online advertising won the INFORMS Society of Marketing Science Long Term Impact award. He testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on competition and privacy in digital advertising. His work has been referenced in White House reports, European Commission documents, the New York Times, the Economist and elsewhere.

Jennifer Riel is an adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management, where she has taught teaching strategy, innovation and integrative thinking to undergraduate, MBA and executive audiences. In this capacity, Jennifer has created and led custom workshops with large public and private sector organizations around the world.

In her day job, Jennifer leads strategy work at IDEO, the global innovation consulting firm. She also serves as strategy and innovation adviser to senior leaders at several Fortune 100 companies.

Jennifer is the author of Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking (with Roger L. Martin, Harvard Business Review Publishing, 2017) She previously served as an editor and collaborator on several of Roger’s books, including The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking (2007), The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the New Competitive Advantage (2009) and Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works (with A.G. Lafley, 2013). She has published articles in the Harvard Business Review, the Globe and Mail, Businessweek, Strategy Magazine and Rotman Magazine.

Jennifer received her MBA from the Rotman School of Management in 2006. Her undergraduate degree is in English literature and history, from Queen’s University in 1996.

Mark Weber is the director of the Conrad Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology Centre (Conrad) at the University of Waterloo. Prior to his current role, Mark was the inaugural director of the graduate diploma in social innovation at UW and served on the faculty of the Rotman School of Management and the University of Toronto — Missisauga campus at the University of Toronto for several years. He earned his PhD in management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and also holds a master's degree in social psychology and an MBA.

Mark is an award-winning teacher and researcher who has been on faculty and taught courses on negotiations and organizational behaviour to students at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, INSEAD and the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. He consults extensively and has provided training to executives and professionals in the automotive, education, health care, pharmaceutical, broadcast media, entertainment, telecommunications, technology and financial services industries, and in government at all levels. He also facilitates strategic planning for not-for-profit and for-profit organizations alike. Mark’s early achievements included both national and international awards for public speaking and debating. His previous professional experiences included managerial and leadership roles in local government, the financial services sector and in not-for-profit organizations.

Ross Wallace is a principal at Santis Health – a public affairs firm based in Toronto with offices across the country that focuses exclusively on helping health care and life sciences organizations develop impactful solutions to complex strategy and policy challenges.

At Santis, Ross has worked with a wide range of clients in the public sector (including Canada’s Drug Agency, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research), the private sector (including Shopper’s Drug Mart, GE Healthcare, GSK and Roche) and the not-for- profit sector (including the Arthritis Society of Canada, Diabetes Canada and the Health Charities Coalition of Canada).

Before joining Santis in 2014, Ross was the Director of Government Affairs and Corporate Responsibility at AstraZeneca Canada (AZC). With overall responsibility for the company’s public policy and advocacy efforts, Ross led a national team of colleagues and directly supported three CEOs in their policymaker and stakeholder engagement efforts. 

Ross joined AZC, after nearly four years as the director of strategic partnerships at the MaRS Discovery District, an innovation incubator and urban science park in downtown Toronto. One of the organization’s first full-time employees, Ross built strong ties with all three orders of government, developed a global network of commercialization collaborators and launched the organization’s social innovation initiative. Ross also spent five years working in Washington, DC – first at the Embassy of Canada and then at the G7 Group, a political and economic forecasting firm.

Beyond his work at Santis, Ross spent eight years as an innovation fellow at Women’s College Hospital, where he advised the Institute for Health System Solutions and Virtual Care (known as “WIHV”) on public policy, strategy and stakeholder relations. Ross has an MPA from Queen’s University and an MBA from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.