When Jemima Frimpong joined NYU Abu Dhabi in 2020, she stepped into a campus that didn’t yet have a business school. Today, the Stern School of Business at NYU Abu Dhabi stands as one of the region’s most ambitious educational initiatives, with its MBA program gaining recognition across the Gulf and an EMBA set to welcome its first cohort next year — progress driven in part by her leadership during the formative phases.
As Vice Dean of Programs and Associate Professor of Management at Stern at NYUAD, Frimpong oversaw the development, implementation, and quality management of the curriculum and academic policies. Alongside these responsibilities, she has expanded a research portfolio exploring how people make decisions within organizations and how those choices shape a broad range of outcomes; from how employees experience the workplace, to population health.
Born in Ghana and educated in the US, Frimpong entered university expecting to pursue medicine. But early coursework in public health policy and management shifted her focus toward the systems behind people’s experiences — the structures that influence access, opportunity, and attainment.
“I wanted to understand the roles that organizations and people within them have when we talk about how systems function,” she says. “That question stayed with me. It shaped my research interests, and intuition that institutions — not only individuals — shape outcomes in ways we often overlook.”
This curiosity led her to complete a PhD in Management Science and Economics at the Wharton School, where she examined healthcare systems through an organizational lens. The blend of business school training with an interest in health systems became the foundation of her academic life. From there, she spent seven years at Columbia University and four years at Johns Hopkins University before making the move to the Gulf.
Laying the groundwork
At NYUAD, she took on leadership of the undergraduate Business, Organizations and Society major. The role required building the program’s framework, securing accreditation, and shaping a curriculum that linked management theory and practice with social science insight.
“The opportunity to help build a new program was quite exciting,” she says. “When I look back, I’m proud of what we were able to do, coming into a new institution and establishing something from the ground up.”
After three years guiding the undergraduate major, she joined the new MBA program at Stern at NYUAD, first as Associate Dean and then as Vice Dean of Programs. Her mandate was to help define a globally competitive curriculum that also reflected the region’s growing emphasis on entrepreneurship, innovation, and leadership development.
“We wanted to make sure that the curriculum trained people for the region,” Frimpong says, “so we encouraged working with business cases, examples and scenarios that are relevant to this part of the world.”
Today the MBA program reflects that philosophy, incorporating regional case studies, Gulf-focused industry projects, and courses rooted in the UAE’s evolving economic landscape. The forthcoming EMBA will extend this work to senior professionals seeking global business training shaped by local realities.
Throughout her administrative leadership, Frimpong has continued to advance her research on how individuals navigate decisions at work. Her studies explore how people assess risk, decide whether to speak up, and interpret the informal signals that shape their professional environment. Her findings often reveal a gap between what policies prescribe and what employees actually experience.
“The decision-making process is what I’m really interested in,” she says. “I care a great deal about the actual decisions, as well as in how individuals weigh perceptions, risks, and the potential impact of their decisions .”
Her work underscores that effective organizational functioning requires an understanding of the intricate balance between the managerial, psychological and social forces behind decisions.
Turning to the brain to understand how organizations make decisions
Looking ahead, Frimpong plans to broaden her methodological toolkit. NYUAD’s Brain Imaging Lab, and its research-grade MRI scanner which offers an opportunity to study the neurological processes behind organizational decision-making, a direction she has long hoped to pursue.
“With the resources here, I can use neuroimaging to understand how people process information and make decisions,” she says. “It opens up a different way of studying organizational behavior, and decisions.”
Her upcoming research will also have an increasing impact in the region. She is part of research projects that emphasize the need to broaden the global lens of management research, and a collaborative project examining healthcare systems in India, focusing on how organizations respond to emerging behavioral health challenges — work she sees as a foundation for a broader program of research rooted in the Global South and Middle East.
“Making my research more regionally relevant is important to me,” she says. “There’s a great deal of possibility here, and I’m excited to explore it.”
Across teaching, research, and institution-building, Frimpong returns to the same guiding principle: organizations shape people’s experiences, and understanding that relationship is essential to improving outcomes, both for organisations and individuals .
“At the core,” Frimpong says. “I want to understand how people make decisions, and how we can help organizations make those decisions better, for the common good.”
