During her doctorate, she also finished the Regional Academy on the United Nations (RAUN), where she won the award for the best student of the year, as well as the Ban Ki Moon Global Citizen Award. She graduated from the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Economics of Globalisation and European Integration - EMJMD EGEI with studies in China, Belgium and Italy as a scholarship holder of the European Commission. Earlier she completed both of her Bachelor’s degrees (in Economics and International Relations) in Belgrade, Serbia, where she is originally from.

Before joining academia, she gained considerable industry experience as a business development manager and a strategy consultant in international companies with headquarters in Germany, Austria and the USA and she was a co-founder and a CEO of the NGO Teach for Serbia, part of Teach For All global network. Before IIB, Jelena Cerar already worked at WU as a Program Manager at our Competence Center for CEE and Emerging Markets, as well as a lecturer for CEMS Master’s program.

Her main domains of research are decision-making and behavioral strategy in multinational corporations (primarily focusing on the role of AI, digitalization, cognition and heuristics in innovation selection and decision-making), headquarters-subsidiary relations, and IB research methods (especially laboratory and field experiments). Her research has been published in highly ranked international journals, such as the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), Journal of Management Studies, and Journal of International Management. She is a Vice President - Communications & Social Media of the Research Methods Special Interest Group of the Academy of International Business.

Recently Jelena has been awarded this year's WU Innovative Teaching Award for her Master in International Management/CEMS WU Vienna course "The Power of Experimentation in Multinationals". Congratulations!