Dr Erika Ito named to Poets & Quants Best & Brightest 2026

The influential online digest's annual list recognizes 100 full-time MBA graduates from elite business schools worldwide. Ito is an accomplished runner, musician, and physician who will join Eli Lilly and Company as a senior manager following graduation. She was also honored as a Top 100 Leader of Tomorrow by the 54th St. Gallen Symposium, which recognizes interdisciplinary leadership at the intersection of medicine, business, and global health.

Ito is most proud of the work she did during her MBA internship with Eli Lilly and Company, designing and implementing an AI-enabled competitive intelligence framework to reshape how senior leadership makes strategic oncology decisions.

“This experience marked a turning point in my career: moving from delivering excellence as an individual clinician to enabling better decisions at scale within complex organizations,” Ito told Carey Business School. “It crystallized my commitment to building human-centered, data-driven systems that improve health outcomes far beyond any single patient or institution.”

Ito said she chose Carey because it uniquely integrates business education with medicine and public health, “allowing me to translate clinical insight into scalable health innovation.” Carey's proximity to Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health made it possible to move beyond theoretical strategy and focus on implementation—including how decisions are made, governed, and sustained in real health systems.

Steven Cohen, professor of practice at Carey, said, “Dr Erika Ito is an exceptional MBA student whose intellectual curiosity, humility, and determination distinguish her from her peers. I am confident that Erika has an extraordinarily bright future and will drive positive change in both business and public health.”