Atul Nerkar research focuses on how technology, innovation and entrepreneurship affect business and corporate strategy. He studies research productivity in organizations and the evolution of technological capabilities in the context of the pharmaceutical, chemical and optical disc industries.

His current research examines the drivers of R&D success in the pharmaceutical, chemical and optical disc industries. In particular, he focuses on firms’ patent portfolios and the evolutionary process underlying their development.

Dr. Nerkar is the former associate dean of the Executive MBA Evening and Weekend Programs at UNC Kenan-Flagler. Before he joined the School, he served on the faculty of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business and as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

He worked with the Unilever Group of Companies in India before he studied at Wharton.

He received his PhD in strategic management from Wharton, where he also received an MA in managerial science and applied economics. He has a bachelor of production engineering from the University of Bombay and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade.

Adam Mersereau’s research interests are in data-driven dynamic optimization. Dr. Mersereau is particularly interested in settings where decisions are best made by integrating estimation and optimization, as opposed to the usual paradigm of estimating parameters first, then optimizing decisions based on the estimates. He addresses problems in retail operations management, revenue management, marketing optimization, and supply chain management. One of his recent research projects is to optimize the distribution of new articles at global fashion retailer Zara.

Dr. Mersereau has published in premier academic journals including Operations Research, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and Production and Operations Management.  He and co-authors received the 2009 M&SOM Best Paper Award for the paper “Retail Inventory Management When Records Are Inaccurate.”

He teaches operations management, statistics, and decision modeling at UNC Kenan-Flagler. He has received several teaching awards, including the Weatherspoon Award for excellence in MBA teaching.

He joined UNC Kenan-Flagler after serving on the faculty of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Prior to his academic career, he worked as an analyst in Goldman, Sachs and Company’s fixed income division, where he advised large corporate and sovereign debt issuers.

Dr. Mersereau earned his PhD in operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned his BSE in electrical engineering, summa cum laude, from Princeton University.

The research interests of Shimul Melwani meet at the intersection of emotions and interpersonal processes in organizations. She is conducting groundbreaking research on the influence of gossip – the negative and positive consequences of initiating and participating in it – for individuals, dyads and groups in the workplace.

She also is examining the interpersonal influence of discrete emotions on organizationally relevant outcomes. By studying the interpersonal effects of discrete emotions, such as contempt, compassion and anger in a series of different work contexts, her research provides a richer picture of how emotions influence attributions, relationships and performance of both those expressing emotions as well as perceiving them. In related research, Dr. Melwani is exploring the role of implicit processes that occur outside of people’s conscious awareness on critical workplace outcomes such as creativity and performance.

Her research has appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology and Psychological Science.

Dr. Melwani teaches courses on global leadership and organizational behavior to undergraduate and graduate students.

She received her PhD and master’s degree in management and organizational behavior from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She received a master’s degree in industrial and labor relations from Cornell University and a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Mumbai.

Patia McGrath’s research interests include corporate strategy, organizational learning, firm scope, post-acquisition integration, corporate restructuring and firm innovation.

One of her current research projects focuses on organizational learning and its firm performance implications in the context of corporate divestiture.

Dr. McGrath joined academia from GE, where she was global director of innovation and strategic connections. In that role, she drove major strategic imperatives and radical innovation projects as part of the chief marketing officer’s core team. Prior to a stint as an investment banker with Credit Suisse First Boston’s technology group, she spent several years with WhiteLight Systems, a VC-backed business intelligence software startup headquartered in Palo Alto, and J.P. Morgan’s Private Client Group.

She received her PhD from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her MBA from Harvard Business School, MS in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT, engineer’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT, and BS in mechanical engineering from Columbia University.

Edward Maydew’s teaching and research interests include taxation and accounting and their roles in economic decisions.

He is director of the UNC Tax Center.

Dr. Maydew is coauthor of “Taxes and Business Strategy: A Planning Approach” with Myron Scholes, Mark Wolfson, Merle Erickson, Michelle Hanlon and Terry Shevlin. He has served as an editor of The Accounting Review, an associate editor of Journal of Accounting and Economics and editorial board member of Journal of Accounting Research and Review of Accounting Studies.

His research is published in the leading academic journals in his field, including Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, Review of Accounting Studies, Contemporary Accounting Research, Management Science, Journal of Public Economics, National Tax Journal, Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory and Journal of the American Taxation Association.

He has received awards for excellence in teaching and research, including the Weatherspoon Award for Excellence in Research and four Weatherspoon Awards for Excellence in Teaching.

Dr. Maydew consults with prominent law firms and corporations on a variety of complex accounting and tax matters. He was employed by a predecessor of PwC in its Chicago office before he earned his PhD.

Prior to joining UNC Kenan-Flagler, he was on the faculty of the University of Chicago. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell University.

He received his PhD from the University of Iowa and BBA from Iowa State University.

The impact of social media on business; open innovation approaches in innovation tournaments and collaborative communities; and virtual teams are areas of research for Arvind Malhotra.

His research projects include studying successful how brands leverage social media for creating a loyal customer base, successful open-innovation organizational and extra-organizational structures; adoption of innovative technology-based services, such as wireless, by consumers and organizations; and management of knowledge in extra-organizational contexts.

Dr. Malhotra has received research grants from the Society for Information Managers Advanced Practices Council, Dell, Carnegie-Bosche Institute, National Science Foundation, RosettaNet consortium, UNC-Small Grants Program and the Marketing Sciences Institute.

He has consulted, conducted applied research projects or led executive development workshops with ESPN, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, IBM, ExxonMobil, Primax Properties, Sprint, RosettaNet Consortium, American Golf Corporation, Cisco, ING Direct and Cargill Sweeteners.

Dr. Malhotra’s research has been published in leading academic journals such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Academy of Management Perspectives, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Academy of Marketing Sciences, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Knowledge Management and Communications of the ACM.

He received the best paper award from MIS Quarterly, the top information science journal, in 2001, and the best paper of the year from the Journal of Services Research and Journal of Knowledge Management in 2005. Two of his papers earned the prestigious Society for Information Managers Best Paper Award.

He received his PhD in business administration and his MS in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Southern California. He earned his BE in electronics and communications engineering from the University of Delhi.

William Maddux’s research focuses on how globalization and multicultural experiences affect a variety of psychological process relevant for organizations, including creativity, leadership, morality, negotiations and decision-making.

He teaches global leadership at UNC Kenan-Flagler, and has experience teaching, consulting and in program direction with a broad array of companies, such as Astellas, Clifford Chance, Diageo, ExxonMobil, NYSE/Euronext, Novant, Pernod Ricard, Stibbe, Takeda and L’Oreal.

Dr. Maddux has published dozens of articles in leading academic outlets in psychology and management, and his work has been featured in media outlets such as The Economist, The New York Times, CNN, BBC Radio, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek and National Public Radio.

Shijie Lu’s research interests include Internet marketing, advertising, competition, empirical industrial organization and Bayesian methods.

His recent projects focus on understanding the issues in online advertising markets with advanced targeting technologies.

His research has been published in Marketing Science. His dissertation on behaviorally targeted display advertising won the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science doctoral dissertation proposal award and received an honorable mention in the Marketing Science Institute’s Clayton competition award.

Dr. Lu received his PhD in business administration from the University of Southern California, where he earned a master’s degree in economics. He earned his BS in mathematics and BA in economics from Peking University.

Lauren Lu’s research centers on firms’ strategic and tactic decisions in the broad context of global supply chain management and health-care operations.

She develops analytical models to investigate firms’ capacity investment and sourcing decisions, and seek to understand firms’ contractual relationships in global supply chains. She uses data to evaluate the performance of various health-care systems to make inferences about operational determinants of care quality and assess the impact of health-care policies on operations.

Dr. Lu has published many research articles in top operations management journals. She is an associate editor for Management Science and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and a  senior editor for Production & Operations Management.

She won the first prize of the INFORMS Junior Faculty Interest Group paper competition in 2009.

Dr. Lu teaches courses on supply chain management and operations management in the full-time MBA and Undergraduate Business Programs. She won the Weatherspoon Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Undergraduate Business Program in 2012.

Prior to her doctoral study, she worked as a senior engineer for Oracle Corporation in California, where she designed and developed the scheduling modules of Oracle Project Resource Management.

She received her PhD in managerial economics and strategy from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management; MS in industrial engineering from Stanford University; and BS in biochemistry from Nanjing University in China.

Mark Lang is Thomas W. Hudson, Jr./Deloitte and Touche L.L.P. Distinguished Professor of Accounting. He teaches and conducts research in financial accounting.

Dr. Lang’s research interests include stock market valuation of accounting information; international accounting and analysis; employee stock option valuation, taxation and exercise behavior; causes and effects of voluntary disclosure; and multinational tax strategy.

He serves on the International Accounting Standards Board’s Share-Based Payment Advisory Group and the American Institute of CPAs Blockage Factor Task Force.

He received his PhD and MBA from the University of Chicago and his BS from Sioux Falls College.