Background
Born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky, I received my undergraduate degree from Sewanee: University of the South, where I studied French, Microfinance, and Women’s Studies. Throughout my time at Sewanee, I worked in the University Outreach Office, studied abroad in Barcelona and Paris, and participated in the Social Entrepreneurship Education Program, which took me to Bangladesh and India. My experiences abroad made an indelible impression on me and encouraged me to focus my career on something larger than myself that would make a lasting positive impact.
Career Path
Prior to business school, I first worked in the non-profit sector. Since 2010, I have also been a Director at Hinkle Holding Company, where I manage a private equity fund focused on direct investments and real estate private equity. Once exposed to real estate investment, I realized that I had a passion for real estate development, and I began working as an asset manager and development associate at Equity Management Group. In this role, I was responsible for all daily operations of income-producing commercial real estate, sourcing acquisitions, and running due diligence of new acquisitions.
Interests & Hobbies
As a Kenan Scholar, I will be working with Greg Brown to identify emerging trends in private equity and family enterprise. There is currently very little existing research on this subject, and we aim to research the private equity goals and strategies that are unique to and employed more frequently by family enterprises. At Kenan-Flagler, I am an active member of the Real Estate Club, the Private Equity Club, Net Impact, and the MBA Impact Investing Training program. In my free time, I enjoy traveling, visiting with friends and family, and spending time outdoors.
Background
I was born and raised in Atlanta, GA. As a result of my athletic inadequacies, I focused on and fell in love with music. Specifically, I played double bass. My original career ambitions took me to the Juilliard School where I majored in double bass performance. However, as a result of wanting a more liberal arts education, I transferred to and graduated from Wake Forest University with a Bachelor of Arts in Chinese in Political Science. Before attending to business school, I spent the last 8 years of my life living in Denver, Colorado.
Career Path
Before entering business school, I was a Senior Consultant at Deloitte Consulting. At Deloitte, I completed work in various industries focused on business process design, cost reduction, organizational design, organizational transformation, and operating model design. Additionally, I have worked with executive leadership teams regarding strategic planning, communications, project management, effective governance, and stakeholder engagement. Prior to Deloitte, I spent five years working for two University Presidents in a variety of roles, culminating as Colorado College’s Chief of Staff. After graduating from business school, I plan to focus on the intersection of technology and public policy.
Interests and Hobbies
My main passions center on education, closing the achievement gap, and the Arts. Prior to business school, I sat on several non-profit boards whose mission was dedicated to those issues. Currently, I am on the Board of Trustees for Wake Forest University. Additionally, I am extremely interested in how communities can improve economic opportunities for underrepresented minorities. Outside of school, I love a good political – drama TV show. Also, outside of my family, I love nothing more than a good brunch.
Background
A native of central New Jersey, I spent the last seven years in New York working in financial services. Most recently, I was at Roundtable Investment Partners, a multifamily office, where I served as a primary client contact for investor relations, planning, and business development activities. Prior to that, I worked for three years at Viteos Fund Services, an outsourced provider of operations and accounting services to hedge funds, where I helped double our client base as a member of the business development team. I also worked at Newedge, an institutional brokerage firm, where I served on the compliance team overseeing personal trading policies. I began my career at MG Advisors, a boutique investment banking advisor and angel investor, where I supported the two senior partners. In 2011, I graduated from the College of the Holy Cross, where I studied Economics and German. While at Holy Cross, I was a president of the Club Hockey team, a member of the Delta Phi Alpha German Honor Society, and a Resident Assistant. Now a Kenan Scholar, I am working with Dr. Maryann Feldman on a project related to the venture capital landscape in North Carolina.
Career Path
My career interests lie at the intersection of finance and innovation, sparked by a career which mirrors the lifecycle of a financial investment. MG Advisors helps a company IPO; Newedge, a broker-dealer, facilitates its purchase by a hedge fund, which handles its operations through Viteos Fund Services; a client of Roundtable Investment Partners invests in that hedge fund. This process, that takes a financial instrument from idea to investment, has always fascinated me, and with the proliferation of areas like financial technology, it’s changing every day. I came to Kenan-Flagler Business School to round out my core business skills and pivot my career to work directly with companies to help them grow. I hope to impact the front lines of innovation by transitioning into venture capital.
Interests and Hobbies
At Kenan-Flagler, I am actively involved in our entrepreneurial and innovation community. I serve in leadership roles within the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital and Blockchain Clubs respectively and competed in the Venture Capital Investment Competition. I also seek to stay involved in the community as an MBA Ambassador and member of Kenan Connections, our partners club, alongside my wife Hannah. An avid hockey fanatic, I also am a liaison within our Sports and Entertainment Club, and in my spare time play both ice and inline hockey, volunteer as a coach with the Capital City Crew in Raleigh, and watch my beloved New York Rangers.
Background
An army-brat from Madison, Wisconsin, I graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a B.S. in Engineering Mechanics and Astronautics, and a B.A. in Portuguese. As an undergraduate student, I worked for NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, was a member of the Men’s Varsity Tennis team, a physics tutor, and President of Wisconsin’s chapter of National Society of Black Engineers.
Career Path
Before graduating, I realized that in order to achieve my goals of helping uplift underrepresented communities, I needed to learn much more about how businesses operate and the policies and regulations they operate within. I started my journey with IMI PLC, working in different countries within different divisions of IMI performing different functions. In 2014, I became Sales Manager in Mexico within IMI’s auto-manufacturing sector. There, I led a team to grow IMI’s sales presence by aligning its business unit to better satisfy customer needs. After these wonderful years of experiential learning, I decided it was time to establish a more foundational education in both law and business. I chose UNC Chapel Hill because of its strong law and business programs, its strong focus on community, and because of family ties to the Tarheel State. Hands down one of the best decisions I ever made!
Interests and Hobbies
As a Kenan Scholar under the guidance of Dr. Christian Lundblad, I will advise several small- and medium-sized businesses in Ghana and Ivory Coast. My goal is to understand the common issues these businesses face, develop and execute strategies to overcome them, and survey the commercial law of these emerging countries to determine whether and how their current legal structure facilitates or inhibits business development.
Background
I was born in Meerut, a small town in India located 70 km west of New Delhi. Raised on many places all over India, I embraced plurality in cultures and peoples at a very young age. I earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering from College of Engineering, Pune in western India, where I developed my love for automobiles. After graduating, I worked as a design engineer for Tata Motors for over 4, where I overhauled legacy product portfolios and designed future vehicles for Tata Motors. I then helped Ford Motor Company conceptualize and develop its product strategy for small cars. Before B-School, I spent six months at private equity firm focused on impact investing and social sector enterprise. Now as a Kenan Scholar, I am working with Dr. Jayshankar Swaminathan on a project related to digitization of value chain.
Career Path
In my career, I have consistently moved towards more strategic roles with my employer; from designing to developing full product portfolios. I came to Kenan-Flagler to hone my skill in developing big picture focus for products which involve several facets of business knowledge, so I have been taking courses of varied disciplines ranging from marketing to operations. After building a solid business foundation and combining that with my diverse experience, I hope to offer companies a well-rounded perspective. My career is focused on roles which have the most impact on managing disruptions in industries. My long term goal is to work in a strategy role, where I am successfully guiding the adoption of innovations in the markets they serve.
Interests and Hobbies
I am a self-acclaimed motorhead. My most thrilling experience so far has been to drive a sports car on Charlotte Motor Speedway. In my undergrad studies, I designed an all-terrain vehicle for a national championship. When time permits, I like to travel; I have gone to 8 countries so far, and I am looking forward to visiting more. I also love nature walks and cycling through UNC’s beautiful campus in the mornings.
Anusha Chari is a Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a Research Associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s International Finance and Macroeconomics Program. She received a PhD in International Finance from UCLA and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College at Oxford and Economics at the University of Delhi. She has held faculty positions at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, the University of Michigan, and The Haas School of Business at Berkeley. She was a research associate at the Swiss Institute of Banking and Finance at St. Gallen, Switzerland and a summer intern at the International Monetary Fund. Professor Chari was a special advisor to the Indian Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and member of an Advisory Group of Eminent Persons on G20 Issues. Her research is in the fields of open-economy macroeconomics and international finance.
LaChaun Banks is a research fellow at the Kenan Institute, working specifically on the drivers of place-based economic growth as part of the American Growth Project initiative. This includes helping to expand the institute’s outreach and visibility with public officials, corporate partners and other stakeholders in major metropolitan areas around the country.
She also serves as a professor of the practice in the strategy and entrepreneurship area at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, where she is an applied economic development scholar focused on how capital flows, industrial policy, and institutional design shape regional opportunity and inequality. Her work bridges economic theory and on-the-ground implementation, examining how investments translate – or fail to translate – into durable local capacity. She specialized in place-based development, with particular attention to how financial actors, public policy, and local governance structures interact to produce divergent economic outcomes.
Before this role, LaChaun worked at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative where she managed the deployment and adoption of the newly launched City Leader Guide for Equitable Economic Development with mayors across the country and internationally.
LaChaun earned a B.A. in international studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a concentration in global economics, trade and development. She later earned an MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler and an MPA from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. LaChaun has a certificate in Management, Leadership, and Decision Sciences from Harvard Kennedy School. In addition, LaChaun studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, studying Asian business and management, and Chinese government and politics.
Shannon oversees program management activities for AGP and its partnerships, working closely across the institute’s units to set objectives, drive success, and promote AGP initiatives.
Prior to coming to the institute, she worked as a designer at the North Carolina Museum of Art, managing diverse projects with a wide-ranging set of stakeholders.
Shannon received her MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and a bachelor’s degree in industrial design from North Carolina State University.
Andrea provides grant management to the institute and UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. She has an extensive background in grant development and management for research, non-profit and governmental entities.
Andrea holds a master’s degree in management from Webster University and a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of South Carolina.
Barbara Entwisle is a social demographer fundamentally interested in how individual behaviors are incented and constrained by multiscale environments (social, physical, natural, policy) and how these environments change as a result of decisions made. She is also very interested in data and research design, including challenges of big data. Dr. Entwisle is currently Kenan Professor of Sociology, with adjunct and affiliate appointments in Geography; Energy, Ecology, and Environment; and International Studies. For six years (2010-2016), she served as Vice Chancellor for Research at UNC-Chapel Hill, and as a result, has a deep understanding of the university, its prospects, and its challenges. Before that, she served as Director of the Carolina Population Center (2002-2010) and currently serves as CPC’s Training Director.
Dr. Entwisle earned her A.B. in sociology-anthropology from Swarthmore College, an A.M. and Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University.