Mary P. Rowe
Mary P. Rowe, an Adjunct Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management who was also one of MIT’s first organizational ombuds, recently won the Trailblazer Award from the International Ombuds Association (IOA). The IOA Trailblazer Award, which was given to Rowe at the organization’s annual conference in mid-April 2026, recognizes “individuals who have devoted significant contributions to the organizational ombuds field over an extended period of time.”
According to a post in The Ombuds Blog, Rowe received the Trailblazer Award in recognition “for her work as a pioneer and one of the most influential Ombuds in the profession.”
Mary Rowe was recruited to MIT in 1973, as a young economist, to work with the then-President of MIT, Jerome Wiesner, and the MIT Chancellor as a Special Assistant for Women and Work. From the first day at work, she listened to both men and women, tasked with “making humans more visible at MIT.” The Special Assistantship soon turned into an early organizational ombuds position. Indeed, four of the first instructions to Rowe from her two bosses turned out to be what are now the Standards of Practice of the International Ombuds Association.
In 1985, Rowe also began as a part-time Adjunct Professor at MIT Sloan, in the MIT Institute of Work and Employment Research (IWER), where she taught Negotiations and Conflict Management. And in 2014, after approximately 20,000 cases, she left the MIT Ombuds Office. She returned to MIT Sloan, doing research and writing, and consulting widely around the world. In recent years, Rowe has developed a personal faculty website that provides open access to dozens of articles and stories and teaching cases—about her work in the past for MIT and about the organizational ombuds profession. She also established two archival Collections in the MIT Library: one about her work in the MIT’s Ombuds Office, and one about organizational ombuds.
As The Ombuds Blog post noted, Rowe remains a “thought leader” in the ombuds profession. In early April 2026, with three close colleagues, she launched a Resource Repository on both the IOA website and her MIT Sloan faculty website. This Resource Repository includes some 30 draft working papers, “posted for brainstorming,” about the value and effectiveness of the organizational ombuds profession.
“I feel deeply honored by receiving the IOA’s Trailblazer Award because it comes from wonderfully skillful and committed ombuds colleagues,” Rowe said. “I am also incredibly happy that MIT President Wiesner’s prescient ideas—about having what is now called an ombuds office—are turning out to be so useful, in thousands of organizations around the world.”
Learn more about Mary Rowe’s career.