Experts

Michael Albert

Michael Albert

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Assistant Professor Michael Albert teaches Quantitative Analysis courses in Darden’s MBA program, and he has joint appointments in Systems Engineering and Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at UVA. His research focuses on combining machine learning and algorithmic techniques to automate the design of markets. His work has appeared in leading artificial intelligence and machine learning venues such as the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).

Prior to joining Darden in 2018, Albert received his PhD in Financial Economics at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He has also worked as a visiting assistant professor of finance at the Ohio State University, as a post-doctoral researcher at the Learning Agents Research Group at the University of Texas at Austin under Peter Stone, and as a post-doctoral researcher in the artificial intelligence group headed by Vincent Conitzer at Duke University.  

B.S., James Madison University; M.S., Ph.D., Duke University

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Lalin Anik

Lalin Anik

Assistant Professor of Marketing

Anik’s research on behavioral economics and marketing delves into how social connection impacts consumer behavior, both through motivation and influence. Her work has been published in Journal of Marketing ResearchSocial Psychological and Personality Science and Social Influence, as well as noted in mainstream channels including Bloomberg, CNN, ForbesHarvard Business Review, National Public Radio, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Before coming to Darden, Anik was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She has consulted with companies, organizations and governments to help people lead happy, healthy, productive lives.

B.A., Brandeis University; DBA, Harvard Business School

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George Barbee

George E.L. Barbee

Batten Fellow and Senior Lecturer

Barbee’s 45-year innovative business career took him across 40 countries. As an entrepreneur, he founded three companies and worked with a number of Fortune 100 companies, including Gillette, IBM, GE, PricewaterhouseCoopers and PepsiCo. The common thread in his small and large company experience, as well as the last 15 years teaching innovation at Darden, is that innovation skills can be learned and taught. He was in the first crop of Batten Fellows at Darden’s Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

Barbee has written and been quoted in The New York TimesThe Wall Street Journal and Fortune. He is author of the book 63 Innovation Nuggets for Aspiring Innovators and blogs about innovation on www.InnovationNuggets.com.

B.A., Brown University; MBA, University of Virginia Darden School of Business

 

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Manel Baucells

Manel Baucells

David M. LaCross Associate Professor of Business Administration

Baucells researches the incorporation of psychological realism into consumer behavior models, focusing on factors like anticipation, reference point comparison, mental accounting, psychological distance and satiation. He is an expert in consumer behavior, decision analysis and game theory.

Prior to his time at Darden, Baucells taught at IESE Business School and the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, as well as served as senior economist at the Rand Corporation in California. He is co-author of the book Engineering Happiness, which applies principles of behavioral economics to happiness, and which was honored with the Decision Analysis Society Publication Award in 2014.

M.S., Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya; MBA, IESE Business School; Ph.D., UCLA Anderson School of Management

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Scott Beardsley

Scott C. Beardsley

Dean and Charles C. Abbott Professor of Business Administration

Scott C. Beardsley is the ninth dean of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. He joined the Darden School as dean and Charles C. Abbott Professor of Business Administration 1 August 2015 after 26 years at McKinsey & Company, during which he held numerous senior roles including as an elected member of McKinsey’s global board of directors. He was based in the firm’s Brussels, Belgium, office for 24 years. Beardsley was drawn to the Darden School’s global focus, its unparalleled education experience, and the University of Virginia’s Jeffersonian tradition of excellence. A frequent author, speaker and media commentator, he has presented at venues such as the World Economic Forum at Davos. He is author of the book Higher Calling: The Rise of Nontraditional Leaders in Academia.

Beardsley holds an executive doctorate in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Tufts University. He has also served on a number of boards, including eight years as chair of the board of directors of the American Chamber of Commerce in Belgium. He is a citizen of France and the United States and is bilingual in English and French. He resides in Charlottesville, Virginia, on the Lawn at the center of the University of Virginia’s Academical Village, a UNESCO World Heritage site. He and his wife, Claire Dufournet of Annecy, France, have three sons.

B.S., Electrical Engineering, Tufts University; MBA, MIT Sloan School of Management; Ed.D., Higher Education Management, University of Pennsylvania

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Alan Beckenstein

Alan R. Beckenstein

Robert D. Landel Distinguished Professor of Business Administration; Area Coordinator, Global Economies and Markets

Beckenstein is an authority on the impact of public policy and global events on companies and industries. He has worked in the areas of competition policy — antitrust, regulation and deregulation — as it affects company decision-making, as well as similar issues in environmental policy, and global economic and financial shocks. Beckenstein has been engaged in teaching and research on both the U.S. economy and other regions globally. He has worked extensively in Asia-Pacific economies and has served as a consultant to government agencies and international corporations.

Beckenstein has been engaged in research and teaching in New Zealand for two decades. He has led a two-week executive development course there and has written numerous case studies on business and government organizations in New Zealand.

A 30-year veteran of Darden’s senior executive program (TEP), Beckenstein has taught executives globally for four decades.

A.B., Lafayette College; M.A., Ph.D., University of Michigan

Professor Beckenstein teaches in the Executive Education program The Executive Program: Strategic Leadership at the Top

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Peter Belmi

Peter Belmi

Scott C. Beardsley Associate Professor of Business Administration

Belmi seeks to understand why rich people are rich, why poor people are poor, and why social disparities between the rich and the poor persist over time. To answer these questions, he examines the social psychological forces that contribute to the reproduction of hierarchies and social inequality. In one line of research, he examines the subtle and insidious ways in which mainstream institutions block disadvantaged group members from getting to the top. In another line of research, he investigates how organizations and critical gateways create motivational barriers that discourage disadvantaged group members from pursuing their goals.

Belmi’s research has been published in top-tier journals, including Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management DiscoveriesPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, as well as featured in The Wall Street JournalBloomberg BusinessweekFortune, The Huffington Post and Financial Times.

B.A., Ateneo de Manila University; M.S., San Francisco State University; Ph.D., Stanford Graduate School of Business

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Sam Bodily

Samuel E. Bodily

John Tyler Professor of Business Administration

How do people weigh risks, then make decisions? Bodily is an expert on decision and risk analysis, publishing in journals ranging from Operations Research to Harvard Business Review. In 2012, he co-authored the paper “Multiplicative Utilities for Health and Consumption,” receiving the best paper award in the journal Decision Analysis.

Bodily is also an expert in strategy modeling and analysis, lifetime consumption and investment planning. He focuses on energy and electric utility industries, forecasting methods, probability and statistics, and revenue management. He is a consultant to many corporations, utilities and government agencies.

B.S., Brigham Young University; S.M., Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Jay Bourgeois

L.J. Bourgeois III

Professor Emeritus of Business Administration; Senior Fellow, Darden Center for Global Initiatives

Bourgeois is an expert in business strategy, its implementation, mergers and acquisitions, and post-merger integration. He has consulted more than 100 public and private corporations, nonprofits and governments across the globe.

The author of a book on post-merger integration and two books on strategy, Corporate Marriage Counseling: Strategies for Integrating AcquisitionsStrategic Management: From Concept to Implementation and Strategic Management: A Managerial Perspective, Bourgeois has also written more than 140 cases and articles in Harvard Business Review and other management journals and is among the top 0.5 percent of most cited authors in the field of management. Before coming to Darden, he taught at Stanford Business School.

B.S., MBA, Tulane University; Ph.D., University of Washington

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Richard Brownlee

E. Richard Brownlee II

Dale S. Coenen Professor Emeritus of Business Administration

When it comes to financial reports — read intently by both lenders and investors — Brownlee is the scholar with whom to consult. He is an authority of not only corporate financial reporting, but also of financial and managerial accounting — the keys to analyzing and understanding the health and overall performance of a business. His areas of expertise include strategic corporate sustainability, management accounting and control systems, corporate pension plans, and financial accounting and reporting.

In 2010 he authored Cases in Managerial and Cost Accounting with Darden Professors Brandt Allen, Mark Haskins and Luann Lynch.

B.B.A, MBA, Ohio University; Ph.D., Georgia State University; CPA

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