The Foster School of Business congratulates Esther Uduehi, assistant professor of marketing and international business, on receiving multiple honors recognizing her growing influence in marketing scholarship.
Most recently, the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) named Uduehi to its 2025 class of MSI Young Scholars, a selective international program recognizing some of the most promising early-career marketing researchers worldwide. Since launching in 2001, the program has recognized scholars whose research has the potential to shape both academic theory and marketing practice.
Uduehi also received the American Marketing Association (AMA) BrandingSIG Young Scholar Award, which honors emerging scholars shaping the future of branding research. Presented at the 2026 AMA Winter Conference in Madrid, the award recognized her innovative research, strong early publications, and leadership potential within the branding field.
Uduehi’s research explores the role brands play in identity, representation, and belonging. Her work focuses on structural power, marginalization, and representation, exploring how consumers form relationships with brands that recognize and include them, and how branding can also reinforce inequality.
“It is great to see Dr. Uduehi gaining international recognition for her boundary-pushing and potentially paradigm-defining research,” said Jeffrey D. Shulman, the Marion B. Ingersoll Professor of Marketing and Chair of the Department of Marketing and International Business, Foster School of Business. “The collection of accolades bestowed upon her is quite rare, but unsurprising given her immediate impact on the field.”
These honors add to a growing list of national recognitions for Uduehi’s research. Recently, she received the 2025 Shelby D. Hunt/Harold H. Maynard Award from the Journal of Marketing, one of the discipline’s most prestigious honors recognizing the paper that makes the most significant contribution to marketing theory. Uduehi received the award for “Intersectionality in Marketing: A Paradigm for Understanding Understudied Consumers,” co-authored with Foster School of Business PhD alum Julian Saint Clair.
Uduehi is the co-founder of The Tenure Project. Before joining Foster in 2021, she earned a PhD in marketing from the Wharton School and an MSc from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. In 2022, Uduehi was named one of Poets&Quants’ Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professors.