Professor Adina D. Sterling graduated with honors from Ohio State University with a BS in chemical engineering in 2002 and graduated with her PhD from Emory in organization and management in 2011. She is an economic sociologist and organizational theorist who specializes in studying the way firms and labor and product markets interact and the implications of these interactions on organizational behaviors and career outcomes. Ultimately, her work helps to identify the underlying causes of workplace, career, and labor market inequality, as well as how workplace and labor market practices can be effective in remediating inequality.

Professor Sterling leads the Equity by Design Lab at Stanford GSB, and currently has projects focused on how individuals in their early careers successfully enter good paying jobs, the ways that race and gender influence outcomes in STEM, the influence of demographic characteristics on labor market mobility, tryouts as a pathway to enter organizations especially for historically disadvantaged groups, and how to reduce gender and racial wage gaps. Her work has appeared in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Organization Science, Research in Organizational Behavior, Industrial Labor Relations Review, and the Annals of the Academy of Management. Prior to academia, Professor Sterling worked at Procter and Gamble as a senior engineer.