Margaret Echelbarger

Assistant Professor of Marketing, College of Business
Start Date:  September 1, 2022

Margaret Echelbarger lives by three simple rules – be kind, be humble, be curious. The rest, she says, will fall into place. 

From Boston to Chicago, Margaret was quite the nomad before she settled down on Long Island to start a new chapter as Assistant Professor of Marketing at Stony Brook University’s College of Business. Even though she moved from nearly 900 miles away, her welcoming colleagues – and now friends – made her feel right at home since she started on September 1.

“What I particularly like about Stony Brook is the social and economic mobility it affords its students as well as the number of first generation students who are served,” she says. “And I think it largely does what higher education should do in the context of helping students achieve their greatest potential.”

In the short amount of time she’s been here, Margaret has already made a life-changing impact on many of the students she’s worked with. Her Social Media Marketing class teaches young professionals how to stand out and succeed in a fast-paced, ever-changing digital landscape. 

Not every student will go on to pursue a career in social media marketing, but all of them will leave the class with newfound skills and strategies in place to improve themselves as businesspeople.

“I did a lecture on Twitter earlier this semester, and by the following week, my slides were already out of date,” Margaret says. “This taught me that I need to adjust my approach and revise the lecture for the next term, because I want to help students make sense of these changes in the context of the broader history of a given platform.”

“If there’s ever a class to keep you on your toes, this is it, which is exciting.”

Although much of Margaret’s work is interdisciplinary, she specializes in child consumer behavior, which gives her a unique perspective on the marketing ecosystem. “I’m interested in learning how we become the consumers that we are,” she says.

Margaret earned a PhD in psychology at the University of Michigan after receiving a BA in cognitive and linguistic sciences from Wellesley College. She completed her postdoc at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business before starting her career at Stony Brook.

“Although Stony Brook is a research-intensive university, there’s a great appreciation for teaching, which can sometimes get lost at larger institutions,” she says. “This was a big move for me, so it’s wonderful to feel supported and set up for success. There’s not much more I could ask for.”

Margaret didn’t make the big move all by herself – she is joined by her partner, Gabriel, and her 11-year-old dog, Henry, who has been by her side across four different states and institutions. She recently took Henry for a walk around campus so he could check out her new stomping grounds. “I think dogs make us fundamentally better humans,” she says.

With Henry’s stamp of approval and a semester at Stony Brook under her belt, Margaret knows she’s right where she’s meant to be. 

“I get to have these great meetings with my collaborators and colleagues about the research we’re doing together,” she says. “And it’s all in the service of being a more effective teacher and doing really good science that has the potential to do some good in society.”

Looking forward, she’s eager to apply her interdisciplinary research skills to more on-campus projects as well as lead an SBU research project of her own. 

“I want people to see me as someone who can provide an expert opinion, but also tell a good joke,” she says.