Scholarship and Biography
Brenda Anderson serves on the faculty at both the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University and Tufts University School of Medicine. She is the director of the Executive MBA For Physicians program and the director of Executive Education Programs at The Heller School. Brenda teaches across numerous Brandeis graduate business programs and is extensively involved in providing financial literacy training to physicians in programs such as the EMBA Physicians Program, the American College of Surgeons/Brandeis Health Policy and Leadership Program and the Hanley Center Physician Executive Leadership Institute 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.
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.
Throughout her career, Brenda has received numerous teaching awards from the Tufts University School of Medicine, the Brandeis Heller School and International Business School and 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.