Camelia Kuhnen is an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of North Carolina -- Kenan-Flagler Business School. Dr. Kuhnen's research spans neuroeconomics, behavioral finance and corporate finance. Her work has an interdisciplinary nature, with the over-arching theme of trying to understand how people make financial and economic choices that concern them as individuals or as decision makers in firms. Her dual training in finance and neuroscience led her to conduct research in the new field of neuroeconomics. In this work Dr. Kuhnen has studied the micro-foundations of financial decision making by investigating the brain and genetic mechanisms responsible for learning and risk taking in financial markets. In her corporate finance work, Dr. Kuhnen has analyzed issues at the intersection of behavioral and organizational economics. She has studied how firms select and incentivize employees and has demonstrated the importance of social connections and social comparisons for these processes. Prior to joining the faculty at UNC Kenan-Flagler, Dr. Kuhnen served on the faculty of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Kuhnen received a B.S. in Brain & Cognitive Science and a B.S. in Finance both from the Massachusets Institute of Technology in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Finance from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2006.