Today at Brown

New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service.
Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
The business school at UC Irvine.
And, of course, Brown.

All of them wanted to hire Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell when she finished her Ph.D. in the spring. “I did a lot of wrestling to decide which one of these pathways reflects the kind of professional I want to become,” she said. “They all lead to different and interesting questions.”

The range of job offers she received reflects the scope of Bridwell-Mitchell’s education to date. Her shiny new Ph.D. from New York University’s Stern School of Business is in management and organizational theory. Her master’s from Harvard’s School of Public Policy focused on human resources, labor and education. She has a bachelor’s degree in American policy studies from Cornell — summa cum laude — focusing on education policy.

“I wanted to answer my burning questions on how organizations work,” Bridwell-Mitchell said of her studies.

Why did she choose to come to Brown? “The combination of intellectual focus and policy impact,” Bridwell-Mitchell said, listing Michael White, Mary Fennell and Ann Dill as colleagues whose work particularly excited her. “I came to do my job talk and I loved everyone.”

Bridwell-Mitchell will teach in the C.V. Starr Program in Commerce, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship (COE). “I’m looking forward to being in a place of intellectual curiosity, not where learning is a checkmark on a list of corporate effectiveness,” she says, the latter comment referring to some of the M.B.A. students she taught at Stern.

As a professor, Bridwell-Mitchell wants most to bring her expertise to people who can use it to effect change.

She recalls fondly a group of KIPP charter-school principals to whom she taught organization principles.

“What to them were very academic ideas showed them how to look at their schools a different way,” Bridwell-Mitchell said. “I told them, ‘Here’s an entire body of knowledge that can help you do what you want to do.’”