Dr. Leif Brändle is a lecturer (Akademischer Rat) at the Entrepreneurship Research Group at the University of Hohenheim. He is a fellow in the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung's Eliteprogramm für Postdocs and runs the research project "Mapping the class ceiling in entrepreneurship".
His research interests include social mobility and social networks in entrepreneurship as well as network dynamics of high-technology firms. His research has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Small Business Economics, Business and Society, or the Journal of Business Venturing Insights. Since 2021, Dr. Leif Brändle has been the managing editor of the Springer journal Management Review Quarterly.
His research has been recognized with numerous best paper awards. Among them at BCERC 2024, at the annual conference of the Academy of Management 2021, at the FGF G-Forum 2018, 2022, and 2023 and at the ECSB 3E conference 2019. Dr. Leif Brändle was also awarded for the best dissertation of the University of Hohenheim in 2022.
In his research, Dr. Leif Brändle collaborates in international author teams, he was a visiting scholar at Texas A&M's Mays Business School, and he regularly presents papers at international conferences. In addition to his research interests, he was involved in social entrepreneurship initiatives. In 2017, he was invited to participate in a panel discussion with German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel as a representative of volunteers working in refugee aid.
In his teaching activities, he has been a certified personal initiative trainer in Prof. Dr. Michael Frese's group since 2018 and taught entrepreneurs in the Philippines at Ataneo de Manila University in this context. For the university program "Startup Garage Hohenheim" he was nominated for the teaching award of the state of Baden-Württemberg together with Prof. Dr. Andreas Kuckertz and Dr. Martin Allmendinger.
