Michael Toffel

Professor Toffel is the Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management, Faculty Chair of the HBS Business and Environment Initiative, and is course head of and teaches the Technology & Operations Management core MBA course. Mike Toffel''s research examines companies'' management of environmental affairs and occupational safety, identifying which types of management programs and regulations improve environmental and safety performance.

His work ranges from academic articles based on econometric analyses of large datasets to case studies of individual companies. His research on occupational health and safety has been profiled by the head of U.S. OSHA and featured in the national press including US News & World Report, and Scientific American. His research has been published in many top scholarly journals including Science, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Science, in practitioners journals including Sloan Management Review and California Management Review, and in mainstream outlets including The Atlantic Monthly and Newsweek/DailyBeast.

Prof. Toffel serves as an Associate Editor of Management Science and on the Editorial Boards of the Strategic Management Journal and Organization Science. He is also a founding board member of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS), which organizes a leading annual academic conference to foster high-quality research on corporate sustainability and to build collaboration among scholars engaged in these topics. 

His co-authors include Julia Adler-Milstein, Ronnie Chatterji, Magali Delmas, Anil Doshi, Glen Dowell, Kira Fabrizio, Andrea Hugill, Chonnikarn (Fern) Jira, Matthew Johnson, Andrew King, David Levine, Julian Marshall, Chris Marquis, Melissa Ouellet, Lamar Pierce, Erin Reid, Tim Simcoe, Sara Singer, Jodi Short, David Vogel, and Yanhua Zhou.

He recommends the HBS Business & Environment Initiative, Environmental Leader, Grist, Ethical Corporation, and SustainableBusiness.comto keep up on corporate environmental news.

Toffel has organized several conferences related to his research, including conferences on corporate sustainability at HBS (2010), the role of information disclosure in corporate transparency and accountability at the National Press Club in Washington DC (2009), business and human rights in operations and supply chains at HBS (2008), and industry self-regulation at HBS (2007) .

Professor Toffel received a Ph.D. from the Haas School of Business'' Business and Public Policy department at the University of California at Berkeley, an MBA from the Yale School of Management, a Master’s in Environmental Management (Industrial Environmental Management) from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and a BA in Government from Lehigh University.  He has worked as the Director of Environment, Health and Safety at the Jebsen & Jessen (South East Asia) Group of Companies Group of Companies"), based in Singapore. He has also worked as an environmental management consultant for Arthur Andersen, Arthur D. Little, and Xerox Corporation. He started his career as an operations management analyst at J.P. Morgan.

Prof. Toffel has served on the Advisory Panel of the Newsweek Green Rankings and on the School Site Council of the Edward Devotion School, a public school in Brookline, MA.