Jay is an internationally recognized thought leader in innovations and productivity improvements related to global operations and supply chain management who has held multiple leadership positions at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.

Jay has published more than 100 research articles and has received numerous awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, George Nicholson Prize, Schwabacher Fellowship and Weatherspoon Distinguished Research and Excellence in Teaching awards. He has been a principal investigator on grants from the National Science Foundation, Obama-Singh Knowledge Initiative and U.S. Department of Education. He is an inducted fellow of the three prominent professional organizations: INFORMS (The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences), POMS (The Production and Operations Management Society) and MSOM (Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society).

Jay received his doctoral and master’s degrees in industrial administration from GSIA (now Tepper School of Business) at Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor of Arts in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Nur Sunar studies operations management problems that involve decision making under uncertainty.

Her primary research areas are applied probability, energy, investment strategies, global supply chains, environmentally responsible operations management and technology management. Her doctoral research examines management problems in energy and sustainability.

In her research, she uses various analytic methods including stochastic control theory, differential equations, dynamic programming, and game theory.

Dr. Sunar teaches courses in operations management.

She received her PhD from Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University and her BS in industrial engineering from Bogazici University in Istanbul.

Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp specializes in global marketing, branding, emerging markets and strategy.

He is the author “Global Brand Strategy: World-Wise Marketing in the Age of Branding” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

He also wrote “Private Label Strategy: How to Meet the Store Brand Challenge” and “Brand Breakout: How Emerging Market Brands Will Go Global,” which have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. “Brand Breakout” was selected as a best business book in globalization for 2013 by Booz & Co.’s Strategy + Business.

Dr. Steenkamp has written 10 cases on companies and brands from emerging markets. An award-winning researcher, he has also written over 150 scholarly publications, and his work has received over 35,000 citations.

He is co-founder of AiMark, a global center involving Fortune 500 companies that spearheads the BG 20 project uncovering drivers of sustainable brand growth.

One of the world’s leading thinkers on global strategy and branding, Dr. Steenkamp has taught, consulted and given executive seminars on all continents. His work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist, The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek and newspapers in Europe, China, India and South Korea. He has been interviewed on television and radio in the U.S., Europe, South Africa, India and China.

He has worked on international lawsuits and trade disputes involving branding and private labels with the Brattle Group and the international law firms King & Spalding LLP, Sidley & Austin LLP, and Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP.

Dr. Steenkamp serves as associate editor or editorial board member of all top marketing journals and is past editor of the International Journal of Research in Marketing.

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences awarded him the Muller lifetime prize for “exceptional achievements in the area of the behavioral and social sciences.” It was the first time the prize was awarded to a researcher in any area of business administration. He also received lifetime achievement honors from the American Marketing Association, the European Marketing Academy and the Society for Marketing Advances

Dr. Steenkamp has taught at universities in Austria, Belgium, China, India, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, U.K. and the U.S.

He received his PhD, master’s and bachelor’s degrees, all summa cum laude, from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and a Doctor Honoris Causa (Honorary Doctorate) from Aarhus University, Denmark.

Brad Staats examines how individuals and organizations learn and improve in order to stay relevant, innovate and succeed on an ongoing basis. His teaching focuses on learning and analytics. In addition to teaching on these topics at UNC Kenan-Flagler, he works with many companies around the world on their learning and analytics strategies.

Dr. Staats integrates work in operations management and human behavior to understand how and under what conditions individuals, teams and organizations can perform their best. His field-based research in such settings as health care and software services, consulting, call centers and retail, uses archival data and field experiments to provide an interdisciplinary perspective to improve both operations’ theory and practice.

He publishes frequently in both leading academic journals and practitioner-focused journals. He is an associate editor at Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and Production and Operations Management.

Dr. Staats leads the Business of Health Care Initiative (BOHC), a cross-disciplinary initiative targeting some of the biggest health-care challenges of our time, at UNC Kenan-Flagler. Although the business school is leading efforts to establish and grow the  BOHC Initiative, it is by design a pan-university effort that draws upon the wide health sciences strengths across campus including our top-ranked schools of pharmacy, public health, nursing, dentistry, arts and sciences, medicine and business. By building on this collaborative powerhouse of resources and talent through the BOHC Initiative, UNC Kenan-Flagler seeks to distinguish both itself and the University as one of the leading national voices in education, research and thought leadership in the business of health care.

He received his DBA in technology and operations management and MBA from Harvard Business School. He received his BS with honors in electrical engineering and his BA with high honors in Plan II and Spanish from The University of Texas at Austin.

Anil Shivdasani is the Wells Fargo Distinguished Professor, director of the Wells Fargo Center for Corporate Finance, and a Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Scholar.

He is an award-winning teacher of mergers and acquisitions and corporate financial strategy.

His areas of expertise include corporate valuation, capital structure, financing strategies, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate governance.

Dr. Shivdasani took academic leave to work as a managing director in the investment banking division at Citigroup Global Markets Inc. He has advised leading companies across the globe on strategic financial issues including valuation, capital structure, capital requirements, credit ratings, financial policy, M&A issues, liquidity management, acquisition financing, convertible instruments, pensions and corporate governance.

He has worked on numerous M&A and capital market financing assignments and his transactional experiences includes IBM’s acquisition of PwC Consulting, which received the Investment Dealer Digest Award for Best Technology Deal of the Year in 2002. He served as exclusive financial advisor to the U.S. Navy in its evaluation of Northrop Grumman’s spin-off of Huntington Ingalls Industries in 2011. In 2015 he advised General Electric on the acquisition of the energy assets of Alstom S.A., the largest takeover  in the company’s history.

His background includes extensive experience with clients in the financial services, industrial, and technology sectors. He has written several widely circulated investment banking reports on current financial trends such as transformational M&A, pension plan underfunding, the credit crisis, banking sector turmoil, sovereign wealth funds, hedge fund activism, private equity, leveraged restructurings, mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, share buybacks, dividend policy and hybrid securities.

Dr. Shivdasani is the author of numerous corporate finance articles that have appeared in the leading academic journals in finance, including Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies and Journal of Financial Economics. His research has been discussed in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Financial Times, Sloan Management Review, Businessweek, CFO, Treasury and Risk Management, Reuters Merger Week and Directorship.

He received the Bullard Impact Award in 2014 in recognition of the impact of his research on business practices.

He is a research fellow of the Asian Institute for Corporate Governance and the Center for Corporate Governance at Drexel University. He has served on several journal editorial boards, including as an associate editor of the Journal of Finance, Financial Management, Review of Financial Economics and Corporate Governance and Control.

He received his PhD in finance from Ohio State University and his BA in economics with honors from Delhi University.

Ovul Sezer studies misguided social heuristics – that is, habitual behaviors that people think are effective in social interactions, but backfire. For example, people humblebrag, give backhanded compliments, namedrop, share an inside joke or mansplain. They think these behaviors are effective in social interactions, but the consequences are often different from what they expect. Dr. Sezer investigates when and why people’s social intuitions are misguided and how they can fix these suboptimal behaviors.

As a behavioral scientist, she uses a multi-method approach, including lab experiments and field data, to document these behaviors in real life and examine both the social and organizational consequences of misguided social heuristics.

Dr. Sezer is an award-winning teacher and researcher. Her work has been published in leading academic journals including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and Journal of Association of Consumer Researchand has been featured in media outlets such as The Washington Post, Forbes, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review and Scientific American.

She holds a PhD in organizational behavior from the Harvard Business School. She graduated with honors from Harvard University with an AB in applied mathematics.

Gill Segal’s research interests include macro-finance, asset pricing, uncertainty and networks.

He teaches courses in investments, capital markets, and production-based asset-pricing.

Dr. Segal’s current research projects focus on two agendas.

• Understanding the role that fluctuations in uncertainty play in explaining asset-prices and economic growth: He examines the macroeconomic and financial implications of different facets of uncertainty.
• Documenting novel relationships between firms’ production decisions and risk premia, and explaining these quantitatively in production economies: He focuses primarily on production networks or multi-sector structures.

His research has been published in the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics and Management Science. Dr. Segal  has has received several awards, including an outstanding paper award from the Jacobs-Levy Equity Management Center for Quantitative Financial Research and  the WRDS Best Paper Award.

He received his PhD and MA in finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He received his MBA and BA in computer science from The Open University of Israel.

Jacob Sagi is an expert on financial economics, decision theory and real estate finance.

His current research interests include risk and return in commercial real estate assets and related securities markets, text-analysis, the intersection of asset pricing with macroeconomics and real options. His decision theory interests include the modeling of decision making under uncertainty, unforeseen contingencies and reference-dependent choice.

His research has appeared in such leading publications as Econometrica, The Journal of Economic Theory, The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial Economics and The Review of Financial Studies.

Dr. Sagi’s research has received numerous distinctions. His work on closed-end funds with Martin Cherkes and Richard Stanton, published in the Review of Financial Studies, received the Best Paper award at the 2006 Utah Winter Finance Conference, one of the most selective conferences in financial economics. His solo work on property-specific risk in commercial real estate was similarly honored in 2017.

Dr. Sagi previously served on the faculty at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt and the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

He received his PhD in financial economics and a PhD in physics from the University of British Columbia. He earned his B.Sc. with honors in physics from the University of Toronto.

Michelle Rogan’s research centers on corporate entrepreneurship. She focuses on acquisitions of social capital – such as how firms use acquisitions of target firms to gain valuable inter-organizational relationships to customers, suppliers and other business partners in the advertising industry.

She is investigating the effect of competition among clients of advertising firms on the formation of new advertising agencies both within and outside of existing advertising holding companies. In the consulting industry, Dr. Rogan is exploring how ownership rights to inter-organizational relationships affect new business development in established firms.

Dr. Rogan’s research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Management Science and Annual Review of Sociology. 

Daniel Ringel is a quantitative modeler interested in creating managerial insights in large markets. His research is focused on the application of leading-edge, cross-discipline methodology to contemporary, empirical marketing problems.

His research interests include competitive analysis, visualization and clustering methods, big data problems, marketing engineering and digital markets. He seeks to provide firms with better means for segmentation, targeting and positioning in large markets.

Dr. Ringel worked for more than 10 years in management consulting with a strong focus on marketing, e-commerce, product development and information technology.

He founded and served as the director of a retail and wholesale business in the hobby industry with own brands and product lines as well as production in China.

He received his PhD in marketing from Goethe-University Frankfurt, where he also earned his MBA in alliance with Duke University. He earned his BA in business and economics from Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University.