Brenda Anderson PhD

Brenda Anderson serves on the faculty at both the International Business School and the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University and is an adjunct associate professor at Tufts School of Medicine. In these roles, she teaches across numerous Brandeis graduate business programs and is extensively involved in providing financial literacy training to physicians in executive education programs such as the EMBA Physicians Program, the Brandeis Health Policy and Leadership Program, and the Hanley Center Physician Executive Leadership Institute Advanced Program. Brenda has held faculty appointments at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Northeastern University, and Boston University. She is a Certified Public Accountant and prior to entering academia, she worked for KPMG Peat Marwick.

Throughout her career, Brenda has received numerous teaching awards. She has been the recipient of six University teaching excellence awards during her tenure at Brandeis, three at the International Business School, and three at The Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She also received the Alan Beckwith award for excellence in teaching at Boston University. Brenda is the former director of the Heller MBA program and currently serves as academic director of Our Generation Speaks, a start-up accelerator focused on bringing together young Palestinian and Israeli leaders to work across ethnic and political lines in building high-impact social ventures within the region.

Brenda’s research focuses primarily on behavioral issues in accounting, with an emphasis on human information processing and decision-making. Early in her academic career, she won the national award for the best dissertation in the Accounting, Behavior, and Organizations section of the American Accounting Association. Brenda has received research grants from organizations that include the National Science Foundation and the Ernst & Young Foundation, and she has published in journals that include The International Journal of Auditing; Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory; Behavioral Research in Accounting; and the Journal of the American Taxation Association.