Santoro, Michael
Academic Appointments
Prof. Santoro has been Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University since 2016. There he founded and directs the Artificial Intelligence, Business Ethics, and Human Rights Lab, and he co-directs the AI and Health Care Justice Lab. Before joining Santa Clara, he taught for two decades at Rutgers Business School, where he was named Professor of the Year in the MBA program. He has also taught at the Harvard Kennedy School and was a Research Associate at Harvard Business School. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Notre Dame, the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the University of Zurich, and the Sinopec Management Institute in Beijing.
Education
Prof. Santoro holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University, an M.P.A. from the Harvard Kennedy School, a J.D. from New York University School of Law, and a B.A. from Oberlin College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Hong Kong.
Research
Prof. Santoro is a leading scholar of AI governance and accountability. He has developed an upstream-design framework that locates responsibility for AI systems in the architecture of institutional decision-making. He applies that framework across business education, the legal profession, healthcare, financial markets, military operations, public administration, and international human rights. His recent articles appear in the American University Law Review, the Journal of Human Rights, the American Journal of Bioethics, Philosophy & Technology, Philosophy of Management, and the Journal of Human-Technology Relations. His co-authored study of machine learning and racial bias in medical appointment scheduling, published in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, received both the MSOM Best Paper Award and the INFORMS Minority Issues Forum Best Paper Award. A parallel strand of his work addresses philosophy of technology and personal identity in the age of AI. His research draws on three decades of scholarship in business ethics, business and human rights, China, and the pharmaceutical and financial industries.
AI Advisory and Applied Research
Prof. Santoro advises public institutions and nonprofit organizations on AI governance and algorithmic accountability, including the Black Women's Health Imperative. With colleagues and student researchers at Santa Clara, he developed the AI Provenance Assistant, which searches multilingual records to identify artworks potentially looted during the Nazi period. NPR's All Things Considered featured the project in 2026. He advises a joint project of the AI Incident Database, MIT FutureTech, and Arcadia Impact on measuring AI incidents in safety-critical domains, and he has advised an IEEE standards initiative on implementing the European Union AI Act. He served on the organizing committee of the NSF-funded DIMACS Workshop on Artificial Intelligence, Governance, and Society, and he founded Santa Clara's AI and Human Rights Speaker Series.
Editorial and Leadership Activities
Prof. Santoro co-founded the Business and Human Rights Journal (Cambridge University Press) and served as its Co-Editor-in-Chief from 2014 to 2022. He is co-editing special issues on artificial intelligence for the Business and Human Rights Journal and the Journal of Human Rights. He is Co-Founder and first President of the Global Business and Human Rights Scholars Association. He served on the editorial board of Business Ethics Quarterly from 2005 to 2025 and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Human Rights. At Santa Clara, he chaired the Leavey School of Business Rank and Tenure Committee from 2022 to 2024.
Publications
Prof. Santoro is the author of A China Business Primer: Ethics, Culture, and Relationships (with Robert Shanklin, Routledge); Wall Street Values: Business Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis (with Ronald J. Strauss, Cambridge University Press, 2013); China 2020: How Western Business Can and Should Influence Social and Political Change in the Coming Decade (Cornell University Press, 2009); Ethics and the Pharmaceutical Industry (co-edited with Thomas M. Gorrie, Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Profits and Principles: Global Capitalism and Human Rights in China (Cornell University Press, 2000). Pragmatism and Business Ethics (with Robert Shanklin) is under contract with Cambridge University Press. He writes regularly on AI policy for Tech Policy Press, the Modern War Institute at West Point, ProMarket (the Stigler Center at Chicago Booth), Columbia Law School's Blue Sky Blog, AACSB Insights, and the South China Morning Post, and he writes the column The Fair Shake for Psychology Today.
Public Policy and Consulting
In 2000, Prof. Santoro testified before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee on the human rights implications of China's entry into the WTO. As Ethics Advisor to the Global Business Coalition for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (now GBCHealth), he helped draft a bilingual English–Swahili code of conduct for A to Z Textile Mills in Tanzania. It was one of the first business codes of conduct in Sub-Saharan Africa. He served as an expert witness in Fagin v. Scolnick, a shareholder-derivative suit against officers and directors of Merck & Co. over the marketing of Vioxx. As part of the settlement, Merck adopted a far-reaching series of corporate governance reforms that he helped design, including the appointment of its first Chief Medical Officer. He later gave expert testimony on the governance reforms Wells Fargo undertook after the scandal over bogus customer accounts. The presiding judge wrote that "Professor Santoro cogently explains why these changes, in many instances long overdue, will benefit shareholders by reducing the likelihood of future misconduct."
Last updated: November 2026
