Ariel Dora Stern is the Poronui Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School.

Ariel’s research focuses on the management of innovation in health care, with a focus on the medical device and pharmaceutical industries. Her projects seek to understand the drivers of innovation among firms and the determinants of how new medical technologies are adopted and used in practice. Ariel is particularly interested in the intersection of the regulation, firm strategy, and economics of health care. She also researches the digital transformation of medical technology and health care delivery, investigating the policy and managerial questions raised by the growth of digital medicine. Her research has been cited by Bloomberg, The New York Times, and National Public Radio.

Ariel received her Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard, where she was a National Bureau of Economic Research Predoctoral Fellow in the Economics of Health and Aging and was honored with the Harvard Kennedy School Dean’s Award for excellence in student teaching. She holds an undergraduate degree in economics from Dartmouth College, where she was a Presidential Scholar and a two-time U.S. national collegiate figure skating champion. Before beginning her academic career, she worked as an economist on Wall Street and at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), the German Development Bank (KfW), and LeapFrog Investments, an impact investment fund.

Ariel is currently a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Business School Health Care Initiative, Digital Initiative, the Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science, and a Research Associate at Ariadne Labs, a joint center between the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which focuses on scaling health care delivery innovation. Previously, Ariel served as the Director for International Health Care Economics at the Health Innovation Hub (hih), the independent think tank of the German Federal Ministry of Health and as a Visiting Scholar at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute’s Digital Health Center. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Society for Digital Medicine (DGDM) and advises health care start-ups.