Professor Lehner is the Director of the Hanken Centre of Accounting, Finance and Governance in Helsinki, the Vice Dean for the QTEM Masters' network for Finland, and the Honorary Director of the ACRN Oxford research network.
His research interests are Impact Investing as well as the digital transformation of the accounting and finance industry with Big Data, Data Science and AI applications. In this role he is also the honorary chair of the Quantum Data Center at Hanken.
In his more than 25 years of field experience, he directed several large R&D projects from the strategic planning through the training and implementation phases in the private and public sectors.
He habilitated in the fields of Accounting as well as in the field of Information Sciences, and is an associate professor for Accounting in Helsinki at the Hanken School of Economics, a docent in information sciences at the University of Jyväskylä and a fractional full professor in Finance at the Middlesex University London.
Before his current posts, he worked as professorial fellow at the University of Oxford. During that time, he developed one of the first big data-driven portfolio optimization models to include ESG related social and environmental risks and returns for use in UK and US pension funds, and has contributed to the revisions of the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 on the taxation of Crowdfunding for social ventures. Before this, he was a senior risk manager and chartered financial accountant in the banking industry.
Prof. Lehner is a regular reviewer at Accounting Organizations and Society and the Journal of Business Ethics. He is the editor in chief of the Emerald Journal of Applied Accounting Research (ABDC:B ranked) and the author of the influential Routledge Handbook of Social and Sustainable Finance.
Recently, he was nominated and a finalist for the Carolyne B. Dexter best international paper award by the Academy of Management (AOM) in 2018, and has won the Emerald Literati - Outstanding Paper Award in Accounting 2020.
