Available to book
Modupe Akinola
Modupe Akinola helps organizations improve leadership performance under pressure through stress biology and neuroscience. She works with executives as a Columbia Business School professor, TED Business Podcast host, and National Geographic expert, translating research into actionable leadership strategies.
Modupe Akinola is a leadership researcher who reveals how stress biology shapes decision-making, performance, and organizational outcomes for leaders at every level. She is a professor at Columbia Business School, host of The TED Business Podcast, and a featured expert on the National Geographic series Limitless with Chris Hemsworth. Her work sits at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and business strategy. Modupe draws on peer-reviewed research to show how physiological stress responses affect leadership behaviour in real time. She translates complex findings about cortisol, cognitive load, and bias into frameworks that executives can apply immediately. Her approach helps organisations redesign structures and routines so that individual performance improves alongside collective results, rather than at its expense. Audiences leave her sessions with a clear understanding of how their own stress responses influence their leadership choices, practical interventions they can implement the same week to reduce harmful stress effects, and a new mental model for connecting organisational design to personal achievement. Her recommendations are grounded in laboratory and field research, not abstract theory. Book Modupe Akinola to give your audience the science behind better leadership under pressure.
Modupe brings Columbia-level rigour on stress biology and decision-making, translating peer-reviewed neuroscience into frameworks your leadership team can operationalise immediately. Her work connects individual performance to organisational design in ways that shift how executives manage pressure and cognitive load.
Featured Projects
often considered together
Elissa Epel
Mental Health
Resilience
Stress Management
frequently asked questions
Something we've not covered here?
Modupe Akinola translates peer-reviewed research on cortisol, cognitive load, and bias into immediately applicable frameworks, drawing on both laboratory and field studies rather than abstract theory.
Modupe Akinola speaks on stress biology and leadership performance, organisational design, decision-making under pressure, and the neuroscience of workplace behaviour. She is a professor at Columbia Business School and host of The TED Business Podcast.
No. PepTalk adds no booking fee, so you pay the speaker's fee and nothing beyond it. The service, from shortlist through to contracts and event-day logistics, is included. For repeat or multi-event bookings, PepTalk can agree preferential rates with your procurement team.
Share your event date, audience, format, objectives and budget, and PepTalk sends a hand-picked shortlist within 24 hours. Each suggestion comes with a profile, a fee and a recommendation on the strongest fit. Once you choose, PepTalk handles contracts, travel and logistics through to event day.
The typical fee range is the speaker's standard in-person fee in their home market, shown in their local currency. It moves with format, location, date and session length: virtual sessions and shorter slots usually cost less, while international travel and peak dates cost more. Send your brief to PepTalk and the team will confirm the exact fee in your currency.
Not all of them, and it makes no difference to your booking. PepTalk's network of 15,000+ speakers covers talent the team works with directly alongside speakers represented by agents and agencies worldwide. PepTalk approaches the speaker, negotiates the fee and handles contracting either way.
Three to six months ahead is comfortable for most events, and 12 months is better for large conferences, peak-season dates or one specific in-demand speaker. Shorter timelines are workable, and PepTalk regularly fills last-minute and replacement bookings within days. Availability is the constraint, so get in touch as soon as you have a date.
