Leigh McAlister is a professor of marketing in the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. She holds the Ed and Molly Smith Chair in Business Administration. An award-winning teacher and researcher, McAlister previously served on the faculties of the University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Her current research focuses on marketing’s relationship to company value. McAlister has been published in the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and the Journal of Consumer Research. This work was supported by Procter & Gamble, H-E-B Grocery Co., 3M, Motorola, Frito-Lay, Philip Morris, Pepsi, Miller, McLane Distributing, and the Marketing Science Institute, where she served as executive director from 2003 to 2005.

Her many honors include the O’Dell Award, the Davidson Award, and the Mahajan Award for Lifetime Achievements in Strategy Research. She was named a fellow of the American Marketing Association in 2015 and of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science in 2018. McAlister is the co-author of “Grocery Revolution: The New Focus on the Consumer” and serves on the editorial boards the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Academy of Marketing Science, and International Journal of Research in Marketing.

McAlister received a B.A. from the University of Oklahoma and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.