Research Team

As a research institute, KLI supports and disseminates research through a variety of means. Advancing research in leadership is of great importance to the Institute, and students work directly with KLI faculty and staff on a wide range of leadership research projects. Ongoing research projects include topics in Women and Leadership, Networked Leadership, The Language of Leadership, Digital Twin Leaders, Effective Mentorship, Followership, and Responsible Leadership Perception.

Women in Leadership

The Women in Leadership team seeks to explore the ongoing challenges women face today, understand the causes of gender disparities in leadership, and find ways to empower and celebrate women leaders through research and advocacy.

Talin Tyvand ’27

Maya Karafotas ’28

Martina Bernheim ’28

Chloe Yang ’30

Motoko Iwata ’30

Networked Leadership

The Networked Leadership team is analyzing the impact of social networks on effective leadership. By using Social Network Analysis (SNA), an analysis on someone's "centrality" within a social network, their capabilities/traits, and even their titles, the research aims to identify the networks which produce productive leaders.

Nethra Mahendran ’28

Daniel Cao ’29

Zoey Marzo ’29

Katie Luong ’29

The Language of Leadership

The Language in Leadership project researches how leaders use communication to motivate and energize their followers. The research will analyze four categories of speeches: motivational speakers, commencement speakers, sports coaches, and business leaders.

Samuel Dominguez ’27

Diego Núñez ’28

Olivia Wegmann-Krider ’29

Siva Kotamraju ’29

Andrew Leopold ’30

Effective Mentorship

The Effective Mentorship Team is responsible for KLI LEAD, an initiative that develops the next generation of industry leaders through transformational leadership, career-aligned guidance, and leadership development.

Harry Patel ’27

William Hou ’29

Responsible Leadership Perception

The Responsible Leadership Perception Team examines how students at Claremont McKenna College perceive and define responsible leadership, drawing on survey responses about their personal experiences and understandings of the concept. Using qualitative data analysis across open-ended questions, the team explores how definitions and demonstrations of responsible leadership vary across different student demographics, including major, gender, grade level, and career interests. The team aims to understand what responsible leadership means within a liberal arts college context and where meaningful discrepancies in perception exist across the student body.

Emre Kocer ’27

Jonas Rickert ’28

Paul Jakob ’30

Followership

The Followership research team is focused on expanding research and understanding of the concept of followership, a topic with limited research, and developing a database to create a more extensive understanding of the various perceptions of followership.

Eleanor Leiter ’27

Marco Cisneros-Farber ’29

Joseph Santhosh ’29

Vedant Agarwal ’29

Digital Twin Leaders

The Digital Twin Leaders team leverages a large language model "digital twin" simulation methodology, where LLMs help emulate human behaviors, to improve leader training exercises.