Personal Biography

Michael Kraten, PhD, CPA is an executive management consultant and business educator. He maintains specialties in entrepreneurship, business modeling, decision analysis, sustainability and resilience, educational gaming, strategic planning, valuation, risk management, and forensic analysis.

Dr. Kraten has more than forty years of management consulting experience and twenty five years of higher education experience. He currently serves as Director of Intellectual Content for the Sustainability Investment Leadership Council (SILC) and as Technical Expert for Sustainability and Resilience at PKF O’Connor Davies.

In academia, he recently completed a two year term as Director of Accounting Program Initiatives at the University of Houston, where he focused on developing innovative approaches to sustainability, entrepreneurship, Artificial Intelligence, and attracting students to the accounting profession.

In 2025, he received TXCPA Houston’s Outstanding CPA of the Year and Presidential Citation Awards. The prior year, he received the TXCPA’s state-wide Outstanding Accounting Educator Award for large universities. He serves on the Board of Directors and Advisory Boards of several major nonprofit entities, including the TXCPA and TXCPA Houston, the Sustainability Investment Leadership Council, American Accounting Researchers and Educators (AARE), SolPods, the CPA Journal of the New York Society of CPAs, and the Center for Professional Accounting Practices at Fordham University.

He began his career in the assurance and consulting practices of Deloitte. After serving as a Consulting Partner at BDO, then the seventh largest global accounting firm, he co-founded a series of boutique consulting practices. His consulting work has taken him to Bolivia, Canada, Great Britain, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan, the Middle East, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Vietnam, including corporate training activities with the national energy companies of Bolivia, Iraq, and Vietnam.

Earlier in his academic career, he served on the faculty of the Universities of Connecticut and Massachusetts in the U.S., Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and elsewhere. He has also presented his work at Dartmouth College, Deloitte University, Harvard Law School, Johns Hopkins University, Texas A&M Law School, and Yale University.

He has authored or co-authored more than thirty peer reviewed articles in academic and practitioner journals. In addition, he has authored numerous podcasts, newsletters, and book chapters for Wiley, Routledge, Henry Stewart, Kaplan, and others. He also authored a book on Business Planning and Entrepreneurship for Business Expert Press.

For ten years, the Social Science Research Network ranked him in the All-Time Top 10% of global researchers. His top-ranked article “Libor Manipulation” was published in the Journal of Banking and Finance several months before the global banking scandal exploded in the public business press.

He earned a PhD in Behavioral Accounting from the University of Connecticut and a MPPM in Public and Private Management from Yale University. He also earned a BBA in Public Accounting from Baruch College, CUNY.