Academic Leadership

Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business is led by distinguished scholars and professionals recognized as authorities in their fields.

David A. Thomas
Dean

David A. Thomas is Dean and William R. Berkley Chair of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. A recognized thought leader in organizational behavior and strategic human resource management, Dr. Thomas’ research focuses on issues related to executive development, cultural diversity in organizations, leadership, and organizational change.
 
Prior to his appointment at Georgetown University, Dr. Thomas was the H. Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he directed the school’s Organizational Behavior Unit. He also served as senior associate dean and director of faculty recruitment at Harvard; led its business school’s required first-year MBA course, Leadership and Organizational Behavior; and held the position of faculty chair for several executive education programs. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard in 1990, Dr. Thomas was an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania.
 
Dr. Thomas has co-authored two books—Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America (Harvard Business Press, 1999) and Leading For Equity: The Pursuit of Excellence in Montgomery County. (Harvard Education Press, forthcoming)—and more than 60 case studies and articles for leading academic journals and practitioner publications.
 
In addition to being widely published, Dr. Thomas has been recognized with a number of prestigious awards, including the Executive Development Roundtable’s Marion Gislason Award for Contributions to the Theory and Practice of Executive Development. He recently received the Administrative Science Quarterly Scholarly Contribution Award for the article that had the most impact on the field in the last five years. He also earned the George R. Terry Award from the Academy of Management for the most outstanding contribution to the advancement of management knowledge for his book, Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America.
 
Dr. Thomas received a Bachelor of Arts in Administrative Sciences and Master and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Organizational Behavior from Yale University. He also holds a Master of Arts in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University.
 
Contact

Phone: (202) 687-3883
E-mail: dathomas@georgetown.edu

Pietra Rivoli
Deputy Dean
Professor of Finance and International Business

With responsibility for leading the faculty and academic initiatives, Pietra Rivoli will advance the school’s efforts to create distinctive excellence in both teaching and research. She has been a member of the finance and international business faculty at the McDonough School of Business for 27 years, and in that time received awards for her published work on business and social responsibility in the corporate environment.

Rivoli also is the author of the book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy (2005, 2009), which has been widely acclaimed by both the popular press and the academic community as a groundbreaking study of globalization. Among the book’s numerous honors are being named one of the best business books of the year by the Financial Times, Booz Allen Hamilton, the Library Journal, and the American Association of Publishers. It has been translated into 14 languages. Additionally, her academic research has been published in numerous leading journals, including the Journal of International Business Studies, Business Ethics Quarterly, and Journal of Money Credit and Banking. In 2006, Rivoli was awarded a Faculty Pioneer Award by the Aspen Institute.
 
Rivoli holds a Ph.D. in Finance and International Economics and a B.S. in Finance, both from the University of Florida.
 
Contact

Phone: (202) 687-4752
E-mail: rivolip@georgetown.edu

William R. Baber
Accounting Area Coordinator 
Robert E. McDonough Professor and Professor of Accounting

William Baber has more than 30 years of experience teaching both financial and managerial accounting at Columbia, George Washington, the University of Rochester (Simon), Dartmouth (Tuck), Carnegie Mellon, Duke (Fuqua), and Georgetown. Prior to entering academics, he worked as an auditor and a consultant with Arthur Young & Company (now Ernst and Young) in Washington, D.C.

Baber received a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh, and a B.S. from Bucknell University. His research, which addresses accounting and public policy issues, is published in a number of academic journals including The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, the Review of Accounting Studies, and the Journal of Accounting and Public Policy.

Baber has served on the editorial boards of The Accounting Review; Accounting Horizons, Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting and Financial Management, and theInternational Journal of Accounting Literature.

Contact

Phone: (202) 687-5293
E-mail: wrb7@georgetown.edu

J. Bradford Jensen
Strategy Area Coordinator 
Professor

J. Bradford Jensen is a professor of international business and economics at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

Jensen’s work focuses on the relationship between international trade and investment and firm performance. His recent work examines the relationship between increasing import competition on U.S. manufacturers and the impact of trade in services on the U.S. economy. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. His work has been published in scholarly journals including the American Economic Review,Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics, and Harvard Business Review. Jensen’s research has been cited in popular press publications including the Economist, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fortune, and Businessweek. 

Prior to joining Georgetown in 2007, Jensen served as deputy director at the Peterson Institute. Jensen also has served as director of the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau, on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, and as a visiting professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. 

Jensen received a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University and a B.A. from Kalamazoo College.

Contact

Phone: (202) 687-3767
E-mail: jbj24@georgetown.edu
 

Bardia Kamrad
Operations and Information Management Area Coordinator 
Professor of Operations

Bardia Kamrad’s primary research interest focuses on risk management and decision making problems in the face of uncertainty. Within this broad area, he has principally concentrated on operational risk management issues and related capital investment problems in production and manufacturing operations. The nature of Kamrad's research is interdisciplinary and effectively can be described as the interface between economics, finance, and operations. In this sense, one of his key research objectives has been to reconcile operations management with market and process related problems. "Essentially, through bridging such gaps, a more in-depth understanding and a greater economic perception regarding production processes can be achieved that is also strategically valuable to decision makers in this arena." 
 
Kamrad has numerous related articles that address the joint problems of pricing, warranty and supply contracts, risk and profit sharing, and quality decisions within an options/economic framework.  For instance, the risk associated with producing items when price uncertainty and system failures can be managed through innovative “warranty” contracts that include the moral hazard implications arising from shared expenditures. In other situations, his research uncovers how purchasing agreements with profit sharing provisions between a manufacturer and its suppliers can help mitigate operating risks arising from purchase quantity variations due to exchange rate uncertainties. In other settings, Kamrad's research demonstrates how production policies can be optimally changed over time to maximize profits when production yields are subject to random variation and demand for the product is uncertain.    
 
Kamrad's broader research interests involve Applied Stochastic Processes; Applied Control Theory and Dynamic Programming; Contingent Claims Analysis; Warranty and Supply Contract valuation; Risk Management problems in Supply Chains; and Inventory modeling. His research has been published in prestigious academic journals, including Management Science; Operations Research;IIE Transactions; Naval Research Logistics; IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management; and the European Journal of Operational Research. Kamrad is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS); Production and Operations Management Society (POMS). He also is a member of the American Finance Association (AFA), the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE), and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Kamrad's consulting experience is equally noteworthy and includes projects in risk management modeling, purchasing and inventory problems, and pricing and forecasting issues. Kamrad teaches at the executive, graduate, and undergraduate levels. His current course offerings include: Real Options Valuation; Operations Research; Productions and Operations Management, Regression Analysis; and Quantitative Modeling.

Kamrad earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Minnesota, a master’s degree in industrial management/technology management from the University of Wisconsin, and both master’s and doctoral degrees in operations research with a minor in operations management from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University.

Contact

Phone: (202) 687-8008
Alt. phone: (202) 687-4112
E-mail: kamradb@georgetown.edu

Robert J. Thomas
Marketing Area Coordinator
Professor

Robert J. Thomas teaches courses in Strategic Market Segmentation, New Product Development, and Strategic Marketing Communications. He has more than 50 publications in the areas of business-to-business marketing, organizational buying behavior, and new product development. His book, New Product Development: Managing and Forecasting for Strategic Success, was a featured selection of the Fortune Book Club, and his book New Product Success Stories: Lessons From Leading Innovators has been published in several languages.
 
Thomas is on the editorial board of the Journal of Product Innovation Management and is an active member in numerous academic associations. He also is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Business Markets. He has designed and taught executive education seminars in the United States and several countries and has consulted with more than 50 organizations in a wide variety of industries and cultures, including both consumer and business-to-business products and services. He has provided expert testimony on demand for new technologies for the Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. Postal Rate Commission, and the International Trade Commission.
 
Thomas holds a Ph.D. in Business and Applied Economics from the Wharton School and an M.A. in Economics, both at the University of Pennsylvania. He also earned an MBA and BBA from the University of Miami. 
 
  
Contact

Phone: (202) 687-3868
E-mail: thomasr@georgetown.edu

Catherine H. Tinsley
Management Area Coordinator
Professor
Executive Director, Women's Leadership Initiative

Catherine H. Tinsley is currently serving on the National Academy of Sciences Committee to Improve Intelligence Analysis for National Security and is a CPMR fellow for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. She is also a Zaeslin fellow at the college of Law and Economics, University of Basel. She has received several grants from: NASA and the National Science Foundation for her work on decision making and risk and from the Department of Defense and Army Research Office for her work on modeling culture’s influence on negotiation and collaboration.

She studies how such factors as culture, gender, reputations, stereotypes, and negotiator mobility influence how people negotiate and how they manage conflict. She also examines decision biases, particularly under conditions of risk and uncertainty. As well, she has examined how and why U.S. based management theories do and do not translate across national cultures. 

She is, or has been, on the editorial board of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, the Academy of Management Journal, International Negotiations: A Journal of Theory and Practice, and International Journal of Conflict Management. She has published in Journal of Applied Psychology, Organization Behavior and Human Decision Processes,American Sociological Review, Research in Organizational Behavior, Journal of International Business Studies, Management and Organizational Research, Research on Negotiations in Organizations, Negotiation Journal, Journal of Applied Social Psychology,Applied Psychology, International Negotiation: A Journal of Theory and Practice, and International Perspectives on Organizational Justice. Her work has been translated for practitioners in the Academy of Management Executive. 

Tinsley has conducted numerous negotiations, conflict resolution, and leadership training seminars for various organizations. She also has run numerous “open enrollment” negotiations trainings for managers of a variety of companies, and within a variety of cultures, including: Germany, Japan, Korea, Slovenia, Hong Kong, India and Mexico. She has collaborated with the White House and U.S. State Department to execute a woman-to-woman mentorship summit. Additionally, she partnered with the U.S. State Department and the Council of Women World Leaders to convene the first ever world-wide meeting of the Ministers of Women’s Affairs. 

Tinsley holds a Ph.D. from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, as well as an M.A. from Northwestern University, and a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College.

Contact

Phone: (202) 687-2524
E-mail: tinsleyc@georgetown.edu

 

Rohan Williamson
Finance Area Coordinator
Professor of Finance and Stallkamp Faculty Research Fellow

Rohan Williamson is a professor of finance and the Stallkamp Faculty Research Fellow at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business.  Professor Williamson specializes in international finance, corporate governance, corporate investment decisions, and risk management. He is currently conducting research in the areas of corporate investment decisions, risk management, bank risk-taking, corporate liquidity and corporate governance.
 
Williamson’s research has appeared in many academic journals including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. He also has written several book chapters and presented his work at many conferences and seminars, and his works have appeared in other non-academic publications such as the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance and the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series.
 
Williamson was the recipient of the 1999 Michael Jensen Prize for the best paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics in the areas of Corporate Finance and Organizations and the 2003 William Sharpe Best Paper Award in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. He received the Georgetown University Junior Faculty Research Fellowship in 1999, the McDonough School of Business Research Award in 2003, and has been a Dean’s Research Fellow since 2003. He also is a member of the Editorial Review Board for the Journal of International Business Studies. He has received the Ohio State University Pace Setters Award and is a member of Beta Gamma Sigma Business Honor Society.
 
He received a Ph.D. and M.A. in Finance from The Ohio State University, as well as an MBA from Clark-Atlanta University and a B.M.E. from the University of Dayton in Mechanical Engineering.
 
Contact

Phone: (202) 687-2284
E-mail: williarg@georgetown.edu