DJ DiDonna

DJ DiDonna has dedicated his career to commercializing social science research to positively impact the world.

He is currently a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School where he teaches MBA courses on entrepreneurship.

DiDonna is also the founder of The Sabbatical Project, which works to explore and normalize sabbaticals. A book based on his research and personal experience with sabbaticals arrives in summer 2026.

In 2019, DiDonna founded The Sabbatical Project to define, explore, and research sabbaticals. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, TIME, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Quartz, Fortune and at TEDx in Silicon Valley. DiDonna has designed sabbatical policies for a variety of organizations around the world, from nonprofits to Fortune 50 companies. On his own sabbatical, DiDonna walked 900 miles on pilgrimage in Shikoku, Japan and ran a poverty research lab, the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO), at his undergraduate alma mater, Notre Dame.

Previously, DiDonna co-founded EFL Global, a fintech company which enabled over $2B in capital to underbanked businesses and individuals across 20+ countries before being acquired in 2018.

He received his MBA from Harvard Business School. Outside of work, you can find him plotting how to be in Big Outdoors.