Peter Tufano

Peter Tufano is Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and Senior Advisor to the newly created Harvard Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. From 2011 to 2021, he served as the Peter Moores Dean at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. From 1989 to 2011, he was a Professor at HBS, where he oversaw the school’s tenure and promotion processes, campus planning, and university relations and was the founding co-chair of the Harvard i-lab.

Tufano’s research and course development has spanned financial innovation, financial engineering, and household finance. His current work focuses on business solutions to climate change. With Professors Toffel and Serafeim, he is launching the D^3 Climate and Sustainability Impact Lab studying how new technologies such as AI can be used to address climate issues. He is studying climate alliances, with an eye to understanding their role in addressing the climate crisis as well as their legal status within current anti-trust statutes. With professors from across the globe, he is designing and will launch in 2023 a new doctoral class on the Financial Economics of Climate and Sustainability. His work on the corporate adoption of ESG practices as part of the Ownership Project at Oxford finds strong relationships between ownership and ESG practices. He is collaborating on a new project that surveys people across the globe about their conceptions of the responsibilities of business.

A believer in the power of collaboration to effect systems change, Tufano is acting as Senior Advisor to the newly-created Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. The Institute will draw upon the extensive expertise and resources across Harvard and beyond to develop and promote durable, effective, and equitable solutions to the climate change challenges confronting humanity. Beyond Harvard, he has helped to form Business Schools for Climate Leadership bringing together business schools in Europe to support businesses addressing the climate crisis facing the planet.

As Dean, Tufano championed the mission of making business, business schools, and entrepreneurship forces for justice and systems change, re-orienting the School around global challenges while transforming the gender and global composition of the class. This orientation, along with his approach of “embedding” the School within the broader University, produced the 1+1 MBA programme; the required Global Opportunities and Threats: Oxford (GOTO) course; its global analogue, Map the System; the Engaging with the Humanities Programme; the Oxford Foundry; Oxford’s joining of the Creative Destruction Lab, its Aspen-Oxford Leadership Programme, and more.

Tufano founded and chairs Commonwealth, a non-profit building financial security and opportunity for financially vulnerable people through innovation and partnerships to change systems. Their work contributed to the passage of the American Savings Promotion Act in December 2014, which removed federal barriers to the sale of prize-linked savings products. He is currently working with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on designing a proposal for a Baby Bond program.

Tufano earned his BA in economics (summa cum laude), MBA (with high distinction) and PhD in Business Economics at Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and recently earned GARP’s certification in Sustainability and Climate Risk.