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Experts
Michael J. Schill
Sponsors Professor of Business Administration
Schill is an authority on international corporate finance, stock market anomalies and business valuation.
Schill is co-author of the book Case Studies in Finance: Managing for Corporate Value Creation with Darden Dean Emeritus Robert F. Bruner and Darden Professor Ken Eades. Recent research articles include “The Post-Acquisition Returns of Stock Deals: Evidence of the Pervasive Nature of the Asset Growth Effect,” published in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis and “The Nature of the Foreign Listing Premium: A Cross-Country Examination,” published in The Journal of Banking and Finance.
B.Sc., Brigham Young University; MBA, INSEAD; Ph.D., University of Washington
William W. Sihler
Ronald Edward Trzcinski Professor Emeritus of Business Administration
Ronald Edward Trzcinski Professor Emeritus of Business Administration
Sihler is an authority on financial management, financial service organizations — such as banks, investments banks and insurance companies — and small enterprise finance. He also is an expert in turnarounds and workouts — the practice of reviving businesses in financial peril.
Sihler has prepared many cases and written numerous books and articles on corporate financial management and financial service organizations, and provides management and educational counseling to a variety of businesses and financial institutions. He co-authored the book Realism in Lending: Anchor Your Bank in a Sound Credit Culture, published in 2011 by The Risk Management Association.
A.B., MBA, DBA, Harvard University
Paul J. Simko
Frank M. Sands Sr. Associate Professor of Business Administration
Simko is an authority on capital markets, financial accounting, corporate financial reporting and disclosure, and enterprise risk management.
Broadly, Simko’s research examines issues related to financial accounting information. He is particularly interested in topics related to how alternative accounting treatments affect the decisions of investors and financial analysts and how investors assess firms’ earnings quality. His current research examines the incentives and consequences of earnings management and valuation issues pertaining to earnings volatility and growth.
B.A., M.Acc., University of Florida; Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin
Scott A. Snell
Frank M. Sands Sr. Professor of Business Administration
Snell is an expert in strategic human resource management — helping organizations compete better through people. He specializes in talent management, human capital strategy and organizational capability.
His research focuses on the mechanisms by which organizations generate, transfer and integrate new knowledge for competitive advantage. He is co-author of four books: Managing People and Knowledge in Professional Service Firms; Management: Leading and Collaborating in a Competitive World; M: Management; and Managing Human Resources.
Snell has worked with companies including AstraZeneca, Deutsche Telekom, Shell and United Technologies to help employees maximize their talents in order to drive firm performance. He recently co-authored “Intellectual Capital Configurations and Organizational Capability: An Empirical Examination of Human Resource Subunits in the Multinational Enterprise,” published in the Journal of International Business Studies.
B.A., Miami University; MBA, Ph.D., Michigan State University
Robert E. Spekman
Tayloe Murphy Professor Emeritus of Business Administration
Robert Spekman is the Tayloe Murphy Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. He is a recognized authority on business-to-business marketing strategy, channels of distribution design and the implementation of go-to-market strategies. Spekman is also well-known for his research and corporate consultancy work in strategic alliances, partnerships and supply chain management. In 2004, he was named a Fellow to the Institute for the Study of Business Markets at the Pennsylvania State University Smeal College of Business.
Spekman has worked with many of the Fortune 100 businesses, as well as with a number of non-U.S. based global firms. The author of more than 100 articles and papers, he has also written/edited eight books and monographs. His Alliance Competence book was published by John Wiley in 2000 and his most recent book, The Extended Enterprise, was published by Prentice Hall/Financial Times in 2003.
B.S., University of Massachusetts, Amherst; MBA, Syracuse University; Ph.D., Northwestern University
Doug Thomas
Henry E. McWane Professor of Business Administration
An expert in supply chain management, Thomas researches production and inventory planning across the extended enterprise, as well as connecting decision models to logistics performance measurement. He is co-founder and chief scientist for Plan2Execute, which provides supply chain software and consulting solutions in warehouse management, transportation management and advanced production and inventory planning.
Prior to joining the Darden faculty, Thomas taught at the Smeal college of Business at Penn State and served as a visiting faculty member at INSEAD and Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management.
B.S., Cornell University; M.S., Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology
Melissa Thomas-Hunt
Senior Associate Dean for the Residential Full-Time MBA Program; John D. Forbes Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Melissa Thomas-Hunt is professor at both the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. An expert in in leadership, team dynamics and negotiations, she researches the factors that unleash, leverage and amplify the contributions made by individuals — particularly women, underrepresented individuals and numerical minorities.
Thomas-Hunt is the former head of global diversity and belonging at Airbnb, where she led the strategy and execution of global internal diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging programs, and she retains an external senior adviser role focused on advancing research on connection and belonging. Prior to her role at Airbnb, she served as vice provost for inclusive excellence and professor of management at the Vanderbilt University Owen School of Management. There she was responsible for advancing equity, diversity and inclusion across Vanderbilt's community of staff, students and faculty. Previous to her time at Vanderbilt, Thomas-Hunt served as global chief diversity officer and professor at Darden.
B.S., Princeton University; M.Sc. and Ph.D., J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University
Davide Tomio
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Tomio’s research focuses on market liquidity, derivative instruments and the consequences of central bank interventions. His recent work delved into the effects that the quantitative easing efforts by the European Central Bank have on the pricing, liquidity and availability of sovereign bonds.
His work has been presented to, among others, the research and policy teams of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank and Treasury Department, the European Central Bank, and the central banks of Germany, Canada and Italy, where he also taught. Tomio’s work has been cited by Forbes and published in the Journal of Financial Economics.
B.S., Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; M.S., University of Copenhagen; Ph.D., Copenhagen Business School
S. Venkataraman
MasterCard Professor of Business Administration; Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research
Venkataraman (Venkat) is an internationally renowned scholar and educator in the field of entrepreneurship. He is also an expert in business and corporate strategy, corporate venturing, new venture creation and financing, regional development and in managing growth.
As a corporate planning executive in a major Indian firm, he was a part of a founding team that created and developed a highly successful new business venture. He consults with Fortune 500 firms as well as several small companies. He facilitates strategy discussion for firms and is counselor to firms, universities and government organizations. He has been a speaker and adviser to the Entrepreneurial Forum — a program of the International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce — aimed at promoting trade through entrepreneurship around the world.
From 1995 through 2009, Venkat served as senior editor of the Journal of Business Venturing — a top entrepreneurship journal.
M.A., Birla Institute of Technology and Science (India); MBA, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta; Ph.D., University of Minnesota
Rajkumar Venkatesan
Ronald Trzcinski Professor of Business Administration
Venkatesan is an expert in customer relationship management, marketing metrics and analytics, and mobile marketing.
Venkatesan’s research focuses on developing customer-centric marketing strategies that provide measurable financial results. In his research, he aims to balance quantitative rigor and strategic relevance.
In 2012 Venkatesan published “Coupons Are Not Just for Cutting Prices” in Harvard Business Review. He also co-wrote “Measuring and Managing Returns From Retailer-Customized Coupon Campaigns,” published in the Journal of Marketing in 2012. He is co-author of the book Cutting-Edge Marketing Analytics: Real World Cases and Data Sets for Hands-on Learning.
B.E., Computer Science, University of Madras, India; Ph.D., Marketing, University of Houston