Darden’s Christoph Herpfer Named One of “Best 40 Under 40 Business Professors” by Poets & Quants

University of Virginia Darden School of Business professor Christoph Herpfer has been named to a list of top global business school professors.

Citing his holistic teaching approach, research with real-world application and pioneering work to develop Darden’s healthcare offerings, Poets & Quants on 18 May named Herpfer to its list of the Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors for 2026.

The publication says its annual list seeks “to identify and celebrate the most talented professors under the age of 40 currently teaching in management education around the world.” Poets & Quants received more than 1,700 nominations, and evaluated each nominee on teaching and research/business impact.

Herpfer, 38, is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the finance area at Darden. He cofounded and co-chairs Darden’s Healthcare Initiative and developed and teaches Darden’s first Healthcare Finance course. He teaches Healthcare and Corporate Finance across Darden’s Full-Time and Executive programs.

His award-winning interdisciplinary research examines how incentives, information and regulation shape outcomes in healthcare and financial markets. It has been published in leading journals across finance, accounting, operations research, and law and economics, and it has been covered by numerous news sources such as the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and the Financial Times. He actively partners with industry to translate his research into real world practice.

Before joining Darden in 2023, Herpfer taught and researched at Emory’s Goizueta Business School and obtained a PhD at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland where he received various awards for his teaching in the Master of Financial Engineering.

In 2024, he received Darden’s Frederick S. Morton Faculty Leadership Award for his work on the Darden Healthcare Initiative.

The announcement on Poets & Quants included a Q&A with Herpfer, in which he describes life as a business school professor, his personal and professional interests, and what he brings to the classroom.

What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it? 

I am applying data science methods to finance questions, particularly healthcare finance. In one of my recent projects, we use the universe of Medicare claims and come up with a new method to detect suspicious billing patterns. We identify roughly $1 billion of suspicious payments annually which are not currently caught by the systems in place. These claims are concentrated within a relatively small cohort of repeat offenders, while the overwhelming majority of providers plays it clean.  

Part of why I think this work is so important is that the small group of bad apples is making it necessary to have all sorts of strict policing safeguards in place that make life harder for the majority of actors that play it fair. 

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students?  They challenge you! In Darden’s case method driven classrooms in particular, students don’t just take your word for gospel. Many have real world experience, and they will push back hard if they disagree.   

What is most challenging?  Designing a class that is valuable to everyone. Students arrive with very different levels of experience and backgrounds. It is tricky to balance going over the foundational stuff so everyone can have the same baseline, with in-depth discussions with someone that has spent 5 years of their life in a specific job. 

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at…  Meaningfully integrate AI in their on the ground workflow, particularly on the factory floor. 

Read the full profile and Q&A and learn more about Herpfer’s research on Darden’s Ideas to Action.