Nadine Kammerlander

Since 2015, Nadine Kammerlander is professor of family business at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management in Vallendar, Germany. Furthermore, she leads the institute of family business and mittelstand (ifbm@WHU) at WHU and serves as Director Diversity. Prof. Kammerlander is active inconducting research, teaching, and practice projects in the fields of family business and family office. Moreover, she is active in promoting women’s entrepreneurship, for instance, by co-initiating the German-wide award “Successful women in Mittelstand firms” in 2018.

Her research has been published in leading academic journals and she has received numerous awards for her research, including amongst others, the Latsis Award, the Caroline Dexter Best International Paper, the FFI Best Dissertation Award, the Schulze Award and the FFI Best Unpublished Paper Award.She is also an Editor of the leading academic family firm journal, the Family Business Review and an Editorial Board Member of four FT50 journals. In recent years, Nadine Kammerlander was awarded as “Top 40 under 40” personality by the magazine Capital, as “Top 100 economics researchers under 40” by the magazine Wirtschaftswoche, and as “Top 100 Family Influencer” by Family Capital magazine. In 2018, she conducted the first quantitative study on family offices that was published in a renowned academic journal.

Before joining WHU, Nadine Kammerlander worked, first as researcher and later as assistant professor, at the Center for Family Business at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. She was a visiting professor at the universities of Bergamo and Cagliari. She gained her PhD in Managment from the Otto Friedrich University in Bamberg („summa cum laude“) and her Master degree in Physics from the Technical University of Munich („with distinction“).

Nadine Kammerlander has gained professional work experience when working as a consultant and junior project leader for McKinsey & Company (2007 to 2012). She was particularly active in the automotive and high tech sector and worked on projects in Germany, in the US, and in Mexico. Until 2018 Nadine Kammerlander was a member of the supervisory board of INDUS Holding AG, a German S-DAX-listed company that frequently interacts with family businesses. Currently, she holds several advisory board member positions, for instance in a startup (Empion) and a research institute (DESY). Moreover, she is a member of the regional sustainability committee.

Prof. Kammerlander is a frequent speaker at practitioner-oriented conferences and occasionally consults family firms via her own firm (HoKa inergy GmbH), e.g., on family governance, family office setup, innovation, or values.