Dr. Yifat Aran is a legal scholar whose work bridges corporate law, securities regulation, and the study of innovation ecosystems. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Haifa Faculty of Law and a research fellow at the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing. She also teaches in the MBA program at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on the legal architecture of innovation ecosystems, with an emphasis on comparative venture law.

Dr. Aran earned her J.S.D. and J.S.M. from Stanford Law School, where she was a fellow of the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (SIGF) and the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics. Her scholarship combines doctrinal analysis, empirical methods, and policy engagement, with recent work examining equity compensation, founder power, and governance structures in high-growth firms. Her work has been published in leading journals including the Stanford Law Review, Columbia Business Law Review, and the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization.

Through her work, Dr. Aran examines how legal institutions structure ownership and control in startup ecosystems — how the law reliably supports financial capital, yet often fails the human capital on which innovation depends.