Michigan Ross faculty are among the most influential in the world. Ross research impacts the way business is both taught and practiced. It makes headlines. It makes policy. It makes a difference.
Ross faculty members consistently report that they derive tremendous professional and personal satisfaction from teaching in the Executive MBA Program. Our faculty include respected scholars, successful consultants, and gifted teachers who are highly motivated to interact with the seasoned executives and high-potential leaders in the EMBA Program. Ross faculty find that working with EMBA students often stimulates provocative and relevant research questions and exploration. Peer-to-peer interaction and the mutual exchange of information is one of the most valuable takeaways for both faculty and students in the Ross EMBA Program.
Michigan Ross' top faculty will teach in both the Ann Arbor and Los Angeles locations. Distinguished faculty include:
Sue Ashford
Faculty Director, Executive MBA Program
Michael and Susan Jandernoa Professor of Management and Organizations
Ashford teaches negotiations in the EMBA program and directs the Professional Development Program. An expert in the areas of organizational behavior and change management, her research focuses on leadership and managerial effectiveness, issue selling, self-management, and organizational change.
Lawrence Abeln
Adjunct Professor of Management
Abeln is leading the development and launch of the west coast Michigan Ross EMBA. From 2007 to 2011, Dr. Abeln served on the faculty at the University of Cambridge, as CEO of Cambridge Executive Education, and as deputy dean of the Cambridge Judge Business School. At Cambridge, Dr. Abeln developed and launched the school’s executive MBA program, 25 new executive education programs, and expanded custom offerings. Dr. Abeln was also MBA program director at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, associate dean of Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, and associate dean at the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business. He is an expert in graduate management education trends and has been quoted in The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He has also served as a commentator for ABC and CBS news broadcasts.
Gautam Ahuja
Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor of Business Administration; Chair and Professor of Strategy
A gifted teacher, researcher, and consultant in the areas of business strategy, Ahuja’s work has been cited in more than 5,000 publications, and he holds numerous awards from top scholarly associations and governments. Ross students honored him with the Executive MBA Teaching Excellence Award in April 2011; in August he was cited by BloombergBusinessweek as one of the five most popular business school professors in the nation.
Izak Duenyas
John Psarouthakis Professor of Manufacturing Management; Chair and Professor of Operations and Management Science; Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering
Duenyas is an expert in supply chain management and coordination, investment decisions, and modeling and control of production systems. As president of the Manufacturing and Services Operations Society, he brings key practical knowledge into the EMBA classroom.
Simon Evenett
Visiting Professor of Strategy
Evenett is the director of economic research at the World Trade Institute in Bern, Switzerland. His research and publications focus on international trade flows and international trade and competition policy. He also teaches at Rutgers University and has held various fellowships with the Brookings Institution since 1994.
Brenda Gunderson
Senior Lecturer, Department of Statistics
Gunderson’s research interests include statistical education, applied statistics, biopharmaceutical applications, and multivariate analysis. She teaches Decision-Making Under Uncertainty in the EMBA Program. She has authored and co-authored textbooks and journal articles, and has received a number of teaching awards at the University.
Stacy Jackson
Visiting Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior
Jackson teaches leadership in the EMBA Program; he also teaches executive education programs in North America, Europe, and Asia in the areas of strategy, leadership, and organizational effectiveness. He is most interested in implementing strategic growth while maintaining core organizational values.
Aneel Karnani
Associate Professor of Strategy
Karnani brings insight to EMBA students in the areas of growth strategies, global competition, emerging economies, and the role of business in society. He studies how firms can leverage existing competitive advantages and create new ones. He also studies the roles of private and public organizations in tackling major societal problems.
Tom Kinnear
Eugene Applebaum Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies and Professor of Marketing
Director Samuel Zell and Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies
Kinnear is a distinguished entrepreneurial and marketing professor, researcher, writer, and consultant. He teaches marketing and entrepreneurship in the EMBA Program. He has amassed extensive experience with small business startups and larger corporations, and has founded and participated in numerous high-tech startups.
Chip Klemstine
Lecturer of Accounting
Klemstine teaches EMBA students in the areas of advanced management accounting, auditing and assurance services, and financial accounting. His professional interests lie in the design and implementation of formal accounting and internal control systems.
Andy Lawlor
Lecturer of Strategy and Entrepreneurship; Director, Global MBA Projects: Business School & The William Davidson Institute
Lawlor is facutly adviser or the Executive Multidisciplinary Action Projects course with Len Middleton. His research focuses on entrepreneurship, new business development, corporate venturing, strategic planning, market development, and project and business planning.
Reuven (Roby) Lehavy
Associate Professor of Accounting; Chair of Accounting
Lehavy's research interests include the usefulness of financial analysts' price targets, stock recommendations and earnings forecasts, earnings management, and the interaction between analysts' earnings forecasts targets and firms' reporting choices.
Maggie Levenstein
Executive Director, Michigan Census Research Data Center; Research Scientist, Institute for Social Research; Adjunct Professor of Business Economics
Levenstein brings real-world relevance to sophisticated economic topics for EMBA students. Her research focuses on firm organization, historical changes in firm competition, information networks, contemporary international cartels, and the design of competition policies for the global economy.
Puneet Manchanda
Isadore and Leon Winkelman Professor of Marketing; Chair of Marketing
Manchanda’s research focuses on strategic marketing problems such as resource allocation, launch planning, and word-of-mouth marketing. Most recently his work has focused on social media and the pharmaceutical, hi-technology, gaming, and insurance industries. His work and commentary are regularly featured in top scholarly journals and business media outlets including The New York Times, Sloan Management Review, Investors Business Daily, and Forbes.com.
Len Middleton
Lecturer of Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Len Middleton is faculty adviser for the Executive Multidisciplinary Action Projects course with Andy Lawlor. His research focuses on corporate strategy, private equity, development, and funding of high-tech startup companies. He is a board member of the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at Ross, a faculty member with the William Davidson Institute, and a faculty adviser for the Tauber Institute for Global Operations.
M.P. Narayanan
Robert Morrison Hoffer Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Finance
Narayanan’s research focuses on corporate governance, managerial compensation, capital allocation, and other key topics in finance. His research with Ross professor Nejat Seyhun has been instrumental in exposing the practice of executive option backdating.
Hart Posen
Assistant Professor of Strategy
Posen teaches in the areas of competition and global strategy. His research is informed by previous work as an entrepreneur in the technology and retail sectors. He has been published in leading journals, and his commentary has been featured in such mainstream media outlets as The New York Times, the BBC, and The Globe and Mail (Toronto).
Bob Quinn
Margaret Elliott Tracy Collegiate Professor in Business Administration; Professor of Management and Organizations
Quinn co-founded the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship at Ross. He has worked with executives in numerous Fortune 500 companies for more than 25 years, focusing on organizational change, vision, and leadership. He has published numerous papers and books and is known for innovative instruction in the classroom.
Nejat Seyhun
The Jerome B. & Eilene M. York Professor of Business Administration; Professor of Finance
Seyhun’s research focuses on risk-return trade-offs in asset prices, insider trading, long-run performance of IPOs, managerial overconfidence, and conflicts of interest. His work with Ross colleague M.P. Narayanan on backdating helped uncover one of the biggest corporate scandals in recent years with significant legal, ethical, and corporate governance implications.
George Siedel
Williamson Family Professor of Business Administration; Thurnau Professor of Business Law
Siedel brings key knowledge of the legal implications for business leaders in the EMBA Program. He is an expert in international business law, negotiation, and dispute resolution, and his most recent work focuses on the ways business leaders can use of law to gain competitive advantage. His research and publications have been cited by appellate courts in the United States and abroad. Professor Siedel has been admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court and in Michigan, Ohio, and Florida.
Valerie Suslow
Associate Dean, Graduate Programs; Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy
Suslow researches the implications of explicit price fixing and cartels. She focuses especially on international cartels, their effects on developing countries, the implications of international trade policies, and antitrust policies.
Jan Svejnar
Everett E. Berg Professor of Business Administration; Professor Business Economics and Public Policy; Professor of Public Policy, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
Svejnar brings expert knowledge and insight to EMBA students in the areas of economic development and transition, labor economics, and behavior of firms. His research focuses on government policies, corporate and national governance, and entrepreneurship. He has published widely and serves as adviser to governments and firms in advanced and emerging market economies.
Dave Wright
Associate Professor of Accounting; Faculty Director, Masters of Accounting Program; Director, Paton Accounting Center
Wright is an expert in off-balance sheet financing, delayed recognition of corporate defined benefit pension obligations, corporate governance, and the quality of financial reporting and auditing.
Minyuan Zhao
Assistant Professor of Strategy
Zhao researches the interaction between firm strategies and external environments in a global context. Her papers on multinational research and development organizations have received awards from the Academy of Management and the Strategic Management Society.
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To read about all of the faculty members at Ross, click here.
