Growing up, Kathleen Perley was told that she wasn’t “college material.” Despite suffering from dyslexia and ADHD, Perley eventually found a home in academia.
A Fulbright Scholar, Perley studied Linguistics before building a digital healthcare agency that she sold to an equity-backed firm. Since then, she has moved into the AI space. At Rice Business, Perley teaches courses on building AI platforms and applying AI strategies to undergraduates and professionals. She also helped the school build an online AI training program for faculty and staff. At the same time, she has authored a book to help executives implement AI across their organizations, with an accompanying podcast starting in the fall.
While Perley may be an entrepreneur, teacher, thought leader, and parent, she also excelled in another role: a student who earned her Executive MBA at Rice Business in 2026.
STARTING A $45-MILLION COMPANY…IN BUSINESS SCHOOL
Kathleen Perley, Rice University (Jones)
In fact, Perley started another venture during business school. Her AdalR startup helps public companies to strike the right messaging so they “understand how the market will hear them before they speak.” Already, AdalR has generated a $45-million valuation, earning coverage from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. While the concept taps into Perley’s linguistics roots, its development was honed by the Rice Business curriculum.
“The Executive MBA gave me a broader operating vocabulary across finance, accounting, strategy, operations, marketing, negotiations and organizational behavior,” she tells P&Q. “You leave knowing how to ask better questions, spot weak logic faster, and move with more confidence when there is no perfect answer. At AdaIR, that fluency matters every day. I do not need to be the expert in every room. I need to translate between experts, see the pattern, and make the call.”
Such success didn’t come easy for someone who shouldered as many demands as Perley. She recalls one drive where she held meetings with a Fortune 500 CEO and a Fortune 500 CFO. She also fielded calls from her engineering team about a product rollout, MBA teammates looking to finish the night’s group presentation, and students asking questions about coursework. On top of that, her son got in trouble at school.
That chaos, Perley says, reflected the true value behind earning an Executive MBA. “You stop asking whether you can keep every ball in the air. You get very good at knowing which ball cannot touch the ground.”
62 TOP BUSINESS SCHOOLS REPRESENTED ON THE LIST
Katelyn Garcia, Wharton School
Perley is among the 71 graduates who are members of P&Q’s Best & Brightest Executive MBAs from the Class of 2026. The 12th incarnation of the series, the 2026 Best & Brightest honors the top EMBA graduates from the top business schools based on measures like career achievements, academic achievement, and class leadership. This year’s class features 39 women and 32 men who were selected from 62 leading EMBA programs found in the Poets&Quants and Financial Times rankings. This includes programs like the University of Chicago’s Booth School, INSEAD, and the Wharton School.
As a whole, the class ranges in age from 31-57. As undergraduates, the Best & Brightest Executive MBAs studied fields as different as Geospatial Intelligence, Food Industry, and Theater. As professionals, they took on roles ranging from CEOs to educators to researchers, with their business cards dotted with designations like MD, PhD, and Esquire. In their careers, they have held leadership roles at household names like the United Nations, Google, Disney, Coca-Cola, Marriott, and Boston Scientific. In their spare time, you’ll find them coaching youth softball, mountain biking or photographing nature scenes. When they arrived in the class, the Best & Brightest were often the ones who always added value, be it with supplying best practices or opening their network to classmates.
And they weren’t afraid to travel across the world to earn their MBA too. Take Katelyn Garcia, a new mom and former Blackhawk helicopter pilot who headed to Wharton when she wasn’t serving in the U.S. Embassy in Georgia. She wasn’t the only diplomat among this year’s Best & Brightest. While studying at IE Business School, Amal Haq moved from the U.S. Embassy in Turkey to its embassy in India. Here, she focused on areas like trade and technology partnerships. This came after her work as a scientist and policy researcher for the U.S. Department of State.
“Earlier in my career, I found deep meaning in supporting U.S. government responses to chemical weapons use in Syria and Iraq, and the Ebola outbreak in 2018. These experiences reinforced the importance of coordination, resilience, and patient institutional work during periods of crisis and uncertainty.”
Temi Oyewunmi, University of Virginia (Darden)
HOLDING LEADERSHIP ROLES IN DOORDASH, SAMSUNG & AIRBUS
This year’s Best & Brightest also played key roles among top organizations. Temi Oyewunmi, who already holds three Master’s degrees before earning her MBA, is the director of Digital Global Products at Airbus. A graduate of the University of Virginia’s Darden School, Oyewunmi’s responsibilities covers areas like security, legal, communications, sustainability, product safety, and archiving. Before taking a career break, Jay Moon, a graduate of SMU’s Cox School, spent two decades at Samsung Electronics, where she served as the firm’s principal designer and UX Director. At U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School, you’ll find Thuy Nguyen. He has published over 40 research papers and holds six patents, while serving as the associate editor for the Journal of Autonomous Vehicles and Systems. In his career, he has been on the forefront of innovation, starting with creating autonomous tractor software for a startup.
“John Deere acquired the company for $250 million, bringing autonomous farming technology to one of the world’s largest agricultural equipment manufacturers,” Nguyen continues. “I then joined DoorDash as a founding engineer of DoorDash Labs, where I developed the first autonomous delivery robot software stack and grew a perception engineering team that deployed 20 robots serving hundreds of customers and stores. DoorDash went public in 2020 in one of that year’s largest tech IPOs. Today, at Motional, I develop world models for autonomous vehicles that will power shared self-driving rides.”
Like Nguyen, Charles William Lentz can seemingly do anything he wants. The superintendent for the New Hope-Solebury School District in Pennsylvania, Lentz service has ranged from being a former commander in the Pennsylvania Commandery to holding different roles with the American Association of School Administrators. Along the way, he has collected citizenship and leadership awards from organizations like the Union League of Philadelphia and the International Order of St. George. As an MBA student at the Wharton School, Lentz continued to serve on the Student Leadership and the Curriculum Innovation and Review committees.
In 2024, Lentz was named the first runner-up to be Pennsylvania Superintendent of the Year. It was honor grounded in embracing innovative practices and focusing on long-term legacy.
“We have revitalized our curriculum, embraced technology and AI as a vehicle to propel our students forward, created creative, hands-on learning spaces such as our new STEAM lab, empowered our students’ voice in their learning process, [and] embraced our community as critical partners,” Lentz tells P&Q. “By creating a culture which welcomes creativity, input and innovation, we have been able to propel our school district to be an exceptional national school district and provide each of our students with a world-class education.”
STUDYING IS EASIER THAN DISARMING A BOMB
Athan Fox, Cambridge Judge Business School
One quality that connects many of this year’s Best & Brightest Executive MBAs? They like to build, be it startups or company divisions. Exhibit A: Athan Fox, a graduate of the Cambridge Judge Business School. He describes himself as a “Scientist by training; entrepreneur by necessity. Perpetual student. Builder of improbable things.” Before business school, he started Ever Resource, which repurposes lithium-ion battery materials. In 2024, the UK Startup Awards named his firm the Global Startup of the Year and East Anglia’s Cleantech Company of the Year. While the recognition rewarded Ever Resources’ innovation and excellence, it was also a testament to the founders’ perseverance.
“My co-founder and I kept the company going through very difficult times – including during COVID, when we were forced to use personal savings, credit cards, and even remortgage our homes,” Fox admits. “Building new technologies is never a straight line; I’m proud we are still here, against all odds.”
Across the pond, Corbitt Huseth has been busy building Veritas Ratings while studying at Vanderbilt University’s Owen graduate School. The AI firm, which helps military veterans better navigate the “broken” benefits process, has grown by 15-times over the past two years. Huseth’s work earned the attention of the Nashville Business Journal, which named him a ’40 Under 40’ recipient in 2024. At Owen, Huseth used the classroom to inform how to scale Veritas Ratings, even being voted as the MVP of his Launching New Ventures course by classmates.
“Being surrounded by an exceptional cohort of leaders and operators pushed me to elevate how I approached problems—not just solving them tactically but building systems that could scale. That shift has directly impacted my work at Veritas Ratings, where I’ve focused on translating ideas into structured, repeatable processes and AI-driven workflows that enable growth.”
And let’s just say the pressure of scaling a business and earning an MBA didn’t faze Huseth much. “I’ve been shot, had a parachute failure mid-air, and disarmed a bomb—so most business problems feel pretty manageable by comparison,” writes Huseth, a U.S. Marine who holds a Ph.D. in Human Performance.
A BUILDER MENTALITY
Carlos Ortega, Northwestern University (Kellogg)
The Class of 2026 didn’t just spur growth by originating new technologies. Carlos Ortega, a graduate of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School, founded Latin America’s first corporate pride network at HSBC Mexico. While earning his MBA at UC San Diego’s Rady School, Mathangi Srinivasan jumpstarted the Singapore operations for Illumina, a $4.3-billion-dollar life sciences firm. At Davis Wright Tremaine – home to 600 attorneys – Wharton’s Gerald Glover built a department focused on strategy. Within a year, he was named the firm’s best manager thanks to the high scores given to him by partners and reports alike. Now armed with an MBA from the Wharton School, Glover hopes to take his talent for building to another level.
“My long-term goal is to lead at the intersection of technology, law and policy — whether inside a company shaping how AI or financial innovation transforms people’s lives, or inside an institution shaping the rules that govern it. I’ve spent my career building programs from scratch inside large organizations. I want to do that at a scale where the stakes are higher and the impact is broader.”
Many class members joined business school while pursuing successful careers in medicine. Tyler Tetreault serves as both a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles and an assistant professor at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. Now that he has completed his MBA at USC’s Marshall School, Tetreault is investing that extra time into training for the 2028 Olympic Trials as a marathon runner. Along with being an MBA student at Ohio State’s Fisher College, Leslie Kim has spent the past decade as the university’s head of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery. Last year, she ranked in the top 99th percentile of physicians for patient satisfaction. Nationally, with AAFPRS (American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery), Kim was named the winner of the William Wright Award for Excellence in Mentorship and Service. Like many Best & Brightest, the MBA program exposed her to entrepreneurship – a passion that grew after she completed a two-minute pitch for a potential medical device that would increase her effectiveness as a surgeon.
“What began as a classroom exercise has since evolved into a true entrepreneurial project: I have further innovated the concept, filed a provisional patent, and am currently working through the prototyping process.”
Luke Parker, Warwick Business School
A JAW-DROPPING TROPHY CASE
The Best & Brightest also faced their fair share of crises. During COVID-19, Luke Parker was pulled from the military by the United Kingdom government to serve as a data science leader. In this role, he oversaw the development of a “geospatial decision-support tool.”
“This platform provided the critical products briefed daily by the UK Prime Minister to millions of UK citizens, directly informing national policy and enabling life-saving strategic interventions during the country’s greatest modern crisis,” Parker tells P&Q.
In the process, Parker’s team was recognized by the Computer Science Society for the IT Project of the Year. It was an award that came on the heels of Parker being listed among the Data IQ 100, which recognized the most influential thought leaders in AI and data in the United Kingdom. Like Parker, many 2026 Best & Brightest Executive MBAs have collected some pretty impressive awards.
Ed Mamou, University of Michigan (Ross)
In medicine, Francisco Javier Martinez-Torres, a graduate of the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler School, conducted research that resulted in the best research paper of 2022 according to the Journal of Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine. Not only did Alexis Smith receive the General Surgery Resident Teaching Award from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, she added an Excellence in Surgical Research Award from the same university’s Department of Surgery. As an EMBA student at Emory University’s Goizueta School, Smith also served as her class’s social chair, organizing a yacht cruise for 150 classmates around Côte d’Azur in the French Riviera. Closer to home, the Goizueta MBA enabled her to pursue another dream.
“I had the opportunity to serve as the trauma medical director for the state of Georgia during my time in business school. I went into my Goizueta Executive MBA wanting to better marry financial strategy in healthcare to advocacy for improved access to trauma care, particularly for rural and underserved populations. This role gave me the chance to serve my home state while contributing to quality improvement and value-based care efforts.”
Among other notable award-winners, Ed Mamou, a University of Michigan grad, once opened a restaurant that was named Restaurant of the Year by the Detroit Free Press. Up the interstate to Michigan State’s Broad College, Aris Singleton was named a 40 Under 40 and a Women of Excellence award-winner by Black Enterprise and the Chicago Defender respectively. IESE Business School’s Saulo Santana is a creative extraordinaire, with 80 international awards on his mantel. Admittedly, he has come a long way since the start of his career.
“In my twenties, I sold everything I had to open a chocolate store in a high-end shopping mall,” Santana reminisces. “It failed. It was the first time I experienced full ownership of decisions, consequences, and risk. Looking back, it was my first real MBA.”
Next Page: A look at the EMBA experience.
Page 3: 71 profiles of this year’s Best & Brightest Executive MBA grads.
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