Mary O’Sullivan is an Associate Professor of Management in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research is on comparative systems of capitalism, with a particular focus on corporate governance and financial systems. She has written many articles on the subject and a book entitled Contests for Corporate Control: Corporate Governance and Economic Performance in the United States and Germany which was published by Oxford University Press in 2000. She is currently working on another book, tentatively entitled Financial Systems and Economic Change, which analyses the evolving relationship between financial markets and enterprise and industrial dynamics. 

O’Sullivan completed her undergraduate education at University College Dublin (B. Comm.) and then worked at McKinsey in London for a couple of years. She went from there to do an MBA at Harvard Business School and then a PhD in Business Economics at Harvard University. Prior to moving to Wharton in the summer of 2005, she was employed as an Associate Professor in the Department of Strategy at INSEAD where she had worked since January 1997. O’Sullivan developed and taught the elective on “Innovation, Strategy, and Corporate Governance” at INSEAD in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. She was awarded the prize for the Best MBA Elective Teacher at INSEAD in 1997 and 2000 and she was nominated for the same prize on three other occasions.