Christopher Michaelson, Ph.D.

Christopher Michaelson is the Opus Distinguished Professor of Principled Leadership and the Academic Director of the Melrose and The Toro Company Center for Principled Leadership at the University of St. Thomas, Opus College of Business. As a scholar and business advisor, he explores how meaning and purpose in life and at work can improve our own and others’ lives. Throughout his career, Christopher has built bridges between scholarship and practice. After earning his Ph.D. in philosophical ethics and aesthetics from the University of Minnesota in 1997, he helped launch a business ethics advisory practice, which became part of a global risk consulting network, in the New York office of a Big Four firm. He served on the editorial boards of ten CEO surveys and as the firm’s Strategy Officer to the World Economic Forum on projects examining the role of business in society. A few years into his consulting career, Christopher took a full-time lectureship at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania while keeping a foot in practice. In 2005, he joined the Business and Society faculty of the New York University Stern School of Business, on which he has remained since moving home to Minneapolis in 2006. He came to St. Thomas in 2008 and is also an affiliate faculty member of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics. He is the Humanities and Business Ethics Section Editor of the Journal of Business Ethics, on the editorial board of the Academy of Management Learning & Education, and on the Executive Committee of the International Society of Business, Economics, and Ethics.