About
Esther Uduehi

Esther Uduehi is an Assistant Professor of Marketing and International Business at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. Her research examines the consumers, markets, and brand dynamics that conventional marketing frameworks often overlook, working at the intersection of structural power, cultural dynamics, and consumer psychology to build sharper tools for understanding identity and inequality in the marketplace.

Her published work is featured in marketing's top journals, including the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Consumer Research. It tackles the questions that brands keep getting wrong: when multicultural marketing backfires, why minority ownership disclosure can build trust, what cultural appropriation actually costs, and how intersectionality reshapes who counts as a consumer. She is a sought-after voice on these questions, having presented at leading marketing departments including Columbia, London Business School, Michigan, Toronto, Emory, University of Amsterdam, and USC.

Esther's work has been recognized with some of the field's highest honors. She is a 2026 Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar, recipient of the 2025 Shelby D. Hunt / Harold H. Maynard Award from the Journal of Marketing, the 2026 AMA Branding SIG Young Scholar Award, a 2025 Journal of Consumer Research Ferber Award Honorable Mention, and the 2020 ACR Best Working Paper Award. Additionally, Poets & Quants named her one of the Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professors in 2022.

She earned her PhD in Marketing from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania as a Fontaine Scholar. A Rhodes Scholar, she holds an MSc in Nature, Society, and Environmental Policy from Merton College, Oxford, and graduated summa cum laude from Indiana University with double degrees in Chemistry and Mathematics. 

Beyond her research, Esther co-founded the Tenure Project, a national community focused on issues facing underrepresented faculty in business academia, and serves as Faculty Director of the UW Foster Board Fellows Program. She has served on several Rhodes Scholar selection committees and is on the board of Hugo House, a Seattle literary nonprofit. She welcomes opportunities to engage with organizations, journalists, and institutions, thinking through the cultural and structural forces shaping today's marketplace.