People

Christie Stephenson is the Executive Director of the Peter P. Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business. Prior to joining UBC Sauder in 2016, she spent more than 15 years at leading socially responsible and impacting investing firms including Sustainalytics and NEI Investments (Ethical Funds). She previously worked in politics, government and the non-profit sector.

Stephenson has more than two decades of diverse board experience, having served as a director of cooperatives, non-profit organizations and private companies. She is currently a board director of Canadian Business for Social Responsibility (CBSR) and a governance committee member at BlueShore Financial.

She is a frequent speaker to industry and public audiences on topics related to governance, corporate social responsibility and responsible investing. She has provided training to board directors, accountants, corporate secretaries, investment managers and pension trustees, and teaches social finance at UBC Sauder School of Business.

She is regular media commentator who has been covered by the Globe and Mail, CBC, Report on Business Magazine, Business in Vancouver, among many media outlets.

Kate was identified as an up-and-coming Young Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute and, in 2015, she was honored as one of the top 5 Marketing Researchers in the world by the American Marketing Association. Kate has been inducted to the College of Arts and Sciences, Royal Society of Canada. Kate has received the Junior Research Excellence Award from the Sauder School of Business, the Outstanding Reviewer Award from the Journal of Consumer Research, and the Emerald Citation Excellence Award (for most the cited work in business publications).

Kate currently serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Marketing Research and is on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing, and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Kate has consulted on various behaviour-change projects with clients such as The City of Calgary, Health Canada, BC Women’s Hospital, My Sustainable Canada, BC Hydro, Big Rock Brewery, The United Way, the SPCA, and Celgene Health Care. Kate’s industry collaborations tend to focus on uncovering behavioural insights and shifting consumers towards various types of positive behaviour change.

Carol Liao is an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law and the UBC Sauder Distinguished Scholar of the Peter P. Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics at the UBC Sauder School of Business. She is an award-winning teacher and widely published scholar, including most recently as a co-author of Business Organizations: Practice, Theory, and Emerging Challenges (2nd ed) and a contributing author to a number of ground-breaking new books in business law: The Cambridge Handbook for Corporate Law, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability; The Cambridge Handbook for Social Enterprise Law; and Creating Corporate Sustainability: Gender as an Agent for Change.

Dr. Liao is a past Bertram Scholar of the Institute of Corporate Directors and a former senior associate in the New York Mergers and Acquisitions Group of Shearman & Sterling LLP, one of the world's leading global law firms. She is a steering committee member of the Themis International Network of Female Business Scholars, and is currently co-editing a collection on sustainable business models. She has given over 50 talks around the world, and her work has been cited in multiple media sources including in The Globe and Mail, Financial Post, New York Law Journal, Business in Vancouver, and Director Journal.

Dale Griffin is the Advisory Council Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Sciences and the Interim Director of the Peter P. Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics at the UBC Sauder School of Business. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from UBC, and a PhD from Stanford University. He has taught at leading universities in Canada, Great Britain and the United States, and most recently was at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Professor Griffin teaches courses in Consumer Behavior, Marketing Research and Strategic Decision Making at the MBA, PhD, and executive levels, and a course on Strategies for Responsible Business at the undergraduate level. He also consults in legal cases on consumer decision-making and risk communication. He was formerly a Senior Associate Dean for Academic Programs and for Strategic Communication at the Sauder School.

In 2005, Professor Griffin won both the Sauder senior research prize and the UBC Hampton research prize for his work on understanding how consumers and managers make decisions. He has been an invited speaker at many major university business schools including Harvard Business School, University of Chicago, ULCA, New York University and Duke University.