Madhu Viswanathan Recognized Among Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professors

Madhu Viswanathan, a marketing professor in LMU’s College of Business Administration, has been named one of the Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professors of 2024 by Poets&Quants, a news website dedicated to business education. Madhu was selected from more than 1,000 nominations by students, alumni, faculty, and staff across the country, including several international schools. Each nomination was carefully evaluated based on their research and teaching accolades.

“I am truly honored and humbled by this recognition,” said Madhu. “It is a privilege and most fulfilling to be an educator and witness the growth and success of my students. Their enthusiasm and dedication inspire my research and invigorate my teaching. This award is a testament to our collective efforts and the meaningful impact we strive to make together.”

Madhu is a world-renowned scholar who joined LMU in fall 2019 after 29 years at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he holds the title of professor emeritus. Madhu designed a semester-long course called “Business for Good,” a required foundational course for first-year and transfer business students that focuses on the role of business as a force for good. This course won a Financial Times Responsible Business Education Award in 2024 for innovative teaching.

“I am grateful for the freedom to chart my own journey as a professor,” added Madhu. “Business school is a place where one does not have to be bound by specific ways of thinking or theoretical paradigms. Each student is on their own journey, and I hope I can have a minuscule positive impact on where they are going.”

Madhu also serves as director of the D.K. Kim Foundation Business for Good Program, an endowed program that provides learning experiences on Business for Good to the LMU community, resources and approaches on Business for Good to educators across the globe, and marketplace literacy education for youth worldwide.

Madhu’s contributions extend far beyond LMU to the global academic community. He is best known for pioneering the stream of Subsistence Marketplaces, a bottom-up approach to research, education, and practice at the intersection of poverty and marketplaces. He also founded and directs the Marketplace Literacy Project, which delivers consumer, entrepreneurial, and sustainability literacy education to more than 100,000 women across four continents.

Madhu’s work has garnered over 20 international awards and recognitions for teaching, research, lifetime achievement, and social entrepreneurship. His most recent awards include the American Marketing Association (AMA) Award for Responsible Research in Marketing, the Academy of International Business (AIB) Teaching Innovation Award, the AMA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the AMA William L. Wilkie “Marketing for a Better World” Award.

In addition, Madhu has authored several books including “Measurement Error and Research Design,” “Enabling Consumer and Entrepreneurial Literacy in Subsistence Marketplaces,” “Subsistence Marketplaces,” and “Bottom-Up Enterprise.” He earned a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (1990) and a bachelor of technology in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (1985).

Read Madhu’s full Poets&Quants profile here.

Check out LMU Magazine’s interview with Professor Viswanathan.