Keri Pearlson

Faculty

Keri Pearlson

Get in Touch

Title

About

Academic Groups

Academic Area

Centers & Initiatives

Keri Pearlson is a Senior Lecturer and a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School.  She previously served as the Executive Director of the CAMS (Cybersecurity At MIT Sloan) research consortium.

Pearlson has held positions in academia and industry including Babson College, The University of Texas at Austin, Gartner’s Research Board, CSC, and AT&T. She founded KP Partners, a CIO advisory services firm and the IT Leaders’ Forum, a community of next generation IT executives. She was the founding director of the Analytics Leadership Consortium at the International Institute of Analytics. Pearlson began her career at Hughes Aircraft Company as a systems analyst.

Pearlson's research spans MIS, business strategy, and organizational design. Her current research studies cybersecurity resilience, specifically looking at how boards of directors govern cybersecurity and digital risk, how AI introduces security and business risk,  how organizations build a culture of cybersecurity, and how supply chains and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can be made more cyber-resilient. She is the coauthor of the textbook Managing and Using Information: A Strategic Approach and of Zero Time: Providing Instant Customer Value. Her work has been published in the Harvard Business ReviewMIT Sloan Management ReviewMISQE, The Academy of Management ExecutiveInformation Resources Management Journal, Harvard Business Publishing, The Wall Street Journal, and many other outlets.

Pearlson holds a Doctorate in business administration (DBA) in MIS from Harvard Business School, and an MS in industrial engineering and BS in mathematics from Stanford University. She is the founding president of the Austin Society for Information Management (SIM) and was named “2014 National SIM Leader of the Year.”

 

 

Publications

"Executive Concerns with AI Adoption: Identifying Business and Security Risks."

Pearlson, Keri and Rajiv Dattani, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7315-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, August 2025.

"An Executive Guide to Secure-by-Design AI."

Neto, Nelson Novaes and Keri Pearlson. In Journal of Information Systems Security, Washington, D.C.: 2025.

"Case Study: Responding to a Large-Scale Energy Delivery Sector Cyber Attack."

Keri Pearlson, Michael Sapienza, and Sarah Chou. In Interdisciplinary Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, Cambridge, MA: December 2019.

"Casting the Dark Web in a New Light."

Huang, Keman, Michael Siegel, Keri Pearlson, and Stuart Madnick. MIT Sloan Management Review, July 15, 2019.

"For What Technology Can’t Fix: Building a Model of Organizational Cybersecurity Culture."

Keman Huang and Keri Pearlson. In Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS- 2019), Honolulu, HI: January 2019.

Load More

Recent Insights

Ideas Made to Matter

This new framework helps companies build secure AI systems

New guidance includes 10 questions that can help organizations build secure-by-design artificial intelligence.

Read Article
Ideas Made to Matter

5 cybersecurity priorities that demand your attention

Security leaders must strengthen their defenses against everyday threats while preparing for potentially devastating attacks. Here’s how to get it done.

Read Article
Load More

Media Highlights

Press CIO

5 tips for future-proofing your IT leadership career

"There has been a steady progression for years for CIOs to become more strategic leaders. There are a lot of IT leaders who don't get it yet, and they now have to become the strategy leader they should have been all along," said principal research scientist George Westerman. "The CIO needs a vision of what IT needs to be and the ability to execute," said principal research scientist Keri Pearlson.

Read Article
Load More