D. Carrington Motley

After a 10-year hiatus for college, grad school, and working abroad, Carrington Motley has loved returning to his hometown of Pittsburgh (Sewickley Academy '12) to join the CMU faculty as an assistant professor of Entrepreneurship and Organizational Behavior & Theory at Tepper. Dr. Motley's research lies at the intersection of entrepreneurship, strategy, and organizations research, focusing on how entrepreneurs create successful ventures. Dr. Motley is especially interested in how entrepreneurs manage change and learn from failure and success. Insights from Motley's work will enable entrepreneurs to navigate the dynamic venture creation process more effectively and leverage their past experiences to create high-performing new ventures.

Before graduate school, Dr. Motley worked for four venture-backed start-ups. For example, Dr. Motley was an early employee at Plume Labs [acquired by AccuWeather 2022], a Parisian startup where business was conducted in French. Dr. Motley was also employee #16 Cobalt Biomedicine [acquired Sana Biotech 2019], a biotech startup developing a novel intracellular delivery platform for drugs/biologics. As a serial startup joiner, Dr. Motley developed a passion for understanding what enabled specific new ventures to achieve outsized success. Dr. Motley received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT with a business minor from the Sloan School, an MS in Management Science & Engineering (MS&E) from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in MS&E from Stanford (fall 2022).