Faculty Teaching MS SEM Courses

Dr. Rajiv Shah joined the faculty of the Naveen Jindal School of Management at The University of Texas at Dallas in 2008 as clinical professor in the innovation and entrepreneurship area, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial strategy, new products and technology-management venturing within corporations, and entrepreneurial experience. He also teaches graduate-level courses in the finance area in quantitative and numerical methods in finance. He co-founded and is a managing partner at Timmaron Capital Advisors, a firm that provides advisory services to CEOs, BoDs and PE firms. He also founded The indusLotus Group and consulted for PE, corporate and entrepreneurial clients. Shah has served as chief technology officer, vice president of research and network strategy and vice president of research and innovation for Alcatel North America for four years. Prior to that, he held senior management positions at MCI WorldCom in the wireless strategy and network architecture and design areas over a five-year period and was heavily involved in a half dozen corporate-level merger-and-acquisitions due-diligence activities. Before that, he worked for Texas Instruments for 17 years in various capacities. He served for two years on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as Dr. Chaim Weizmann Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. He has an MS and PhD in electrical engineering from Rice University, specializing in applied physics, and an Professional MBA from Southern Methodist University.

Dr. Stephen Yurkovich is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and holds the Louis Beecherl Distinguished Chair in engineering at The University of Texas at Dallas, where he is also head of the Department of Systems Engineering. Until early 2011, he held a joint appointment as Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering, at The Ohio State University, where he was also director of the Honda-OSU Partnership Program, in which he oversaw endowments of more than $40 million. Also at Ohio State, he served as acting director of the Center for Automotive Research in 2007. In 2008, he was awarded the prestigious John R. Ragazzini Award in Control Education of the American Automatic Control Council (AACC). In 2000, he was awarded the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) Distinguished Member Award and an IEEE Third Millennium Medal. His research has focused on the theory and applications of control systems, in numerous application areas. He has been an author on approximately 250 technical publications in journals, edited volumes and conference proceedings. He has authored and co-authored the books Control Laboratory (1992, Kendall/Hunt), Fuzzy Control (1998, Addison-Wesley-Longman) and Control Systems Laboratory (Simon & Schuster, 1998). Yurkovich was very active in founding and developing numerous educational activities of the Center for Automotive Research at Ohio State, through the development of graduate programs in automotive systems and continuing education for control engineers in the automotive industry. He holds 13 patents, primarily in the area of automotive engine control systems.

Abhi Biswas has a diverse background delivering numerous marketing management courses for MBA and Professional MBA programs over the past 20 years at Purdue University, Southern Methodist University, Washington University and at UT Dallas. The courses that he teaches include Principles of Marketing, Advertising and Promotions Management, Consumer Behavior, Brand Management and the capstone Marketing Strategy course. He has also developed and taught Pricing Management, Marketing Research, Product Management and International Marketing. Over the years he has won numerous awards including the “Honeywell Teaching Award” at Purdue University and the “Outstanding Graduate Instructor” award at UT Dallas. He has regularly served as mentor and adviser to the UT Dallas Naveen Jindal School of Management Full-Time MBA national case-competition teams. He has an electrical engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and continued his graduate studies at the Indian Institute of Management and Purdue University. Biswas also has industry work experience as a marketing manager for the multinational Metal Box, plc; senior marketing manager, Maser Consultancy; and has been a prolific business consultant to various firms including Visonic Securities, Intervoice, AMR, Caligor Medical and others. He also has been a talk-show host on Indian national television and radio networks.

Dr. Gregory G. Dess is the Andrew R. Cecil Endowed Chair in Applied Ethics at The University of Texas at Dallas. His primary research interests are in strategic management, entrepreneurship and knowledge management. He has published numerous articles in leading academic journals such as Academy of Management JournalAcademy of Management ReviewStrategic Management Journal and Administrative Science Quarterly. Much of his work also has appeared in leading practitioner journals, such as Organizational DynamicsAcademy of Management ProfessionalBusiness Horizons and Long Range Planning. He serves on several editorial boards, including those for Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and Journal of Business Venturing. In 2000, he was inducted as one of 33 charter members of the Academy of Management Journals’ Hall of Fame. He also co-authored several books, including Strategic Management: Text and Cases (2010, 5th edition, Irwin McGraw-Hill) as well as two books targeted at the practitioner market: Beyond Productivity (1999, AMACOM: New York) and Mission Critical (1997, Irwin Business: Burr Ridge, IL). Prior to joining The University of Texas at Dallas in 2002, he spent six years as the Gatton Endowed Chair at the University of Kentucky. Before that, he served on the faculties at The University of Texas at Arlington, Florida State University and the University of South Carolina. He was also a Fulbright Scholar in Portugal at the University of Oporto in 1994 and a visiting professor at the Tuck School (Dartmouth College). Dess received his Bachelor of Industrial and Systems Engineering degree from Georgia Tech (1971), his MBA from Georgia State University (1976) and his PhD from the University of Washington (1980). He also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bern (Switzerland) in 2009.

Howard Dover

Dr. Jeff Hicks is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Dallas. Formerly, he was Vice President of Strategy for Adecco Solutions, a division of Zurich-based Adecco, a €25B provider of workforce management solutions. Jeff brings more than 15 years of consulting experience, most recently with Price Waterhouse Coopers and IBM Business Consulting Services, involving primarily business strategy and organizational change work for a cross-industry portfolio of clients in North America and across Asia. He holds a Master of International Management from Thunderbird, and a PhD from the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

Dr. Surya Janakiraman is an Associate Professor of Accounting at The University of Texas at Dallas. He has a Ph.D in accounting from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Janakiraman received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, M.B.A. from Indian Institute of Management and a master’s degree from University of Pennsylvania. He is also the academic director of graduate accounting programs in the school of management. Prior to joining The University of Texas at Dallas, he taught at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Janakiraman’s non-academic work experience includes production responsibilities in an automobile-manufacturing firm, project management for a manufacturing company and management consulting with a leading accounting firm. Dr.Janakiraman’s research interests include design and analysis of executive compensation contracts, performance measurement and evaluation, accounting information and capital markets, analysis of audit fee, cost behavior and cost management analysis. Dr. Janakiraman has published numerous research articles in the Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, European Journal of Operations Research, Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance, Journal of Productivity Analysis, Journal of Management Accounting Research and Managerial Finance. He has also authored a research monograph “Balanced scorecard: Linking strategy to performance” published by the research foundation of the Financial Professionals International. He is in the editorial board of Journal of Management Accounting Research.

Dr. Bhanu Kapoor is a consultant and owner at Mimasic, a consulting services company for low-power chip design and verification, parallel programming and related information-assurance techniques. He has played leading software-technology development roles in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) startups ArchPro (now Synopsys), Atrenta and Verisity (now Cadence). He started his career with Texas Instruments, where he held various technical posts in the research-and-development labs from 1987 to 1999. He led a joint IT and IMEC, Belgium, project on low-power memory architectures for video applications. He also led a SRC-funded joint TI and University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign project on power analysis and optimization. He has helped establish university technical advisory boards and played leading roles in joint industry and university research. Bhanu graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur (IITK), India, in 1987 with a degree in electrical engineering. He received MS and PhD degrees in computer science from Southern Methodist University. He has served as vice president of the IITK Alumni Association. He is senior member of the IEEE and the ACM. He has published more than 50 papers in various IEEE and ACM conferences and journals. He also serves on the adjunct faculty in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas.

Rama Koganti has significant industry experience in automotive design, vehicle systems engineering, vehicle safety and crash testing, materials and manufacturing engineering and quality systems.  In addition, Rama served as the Senate Congress Chair for the 2019 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Expo. He is currently the Director of Program Management at Southwestern Health Resources, as well as a lecturer in the Department of Systems Engineering.  Rama’s work has appeared in more than 80 publications, and he holds five US patents.

Dr. Peter Lewin, a native of Johannesburg, South Africa, studied with Ludwig Lachmann at University of the Witwatersrand for a BA Hons. In economics and earned a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago under Gary Becker. He is currently clinical professor of economics at the UTD, School of Management. He has taught at UTD since 1979, except for 1986-1991 when he was a founding shareholder of a very successful digital-age start-up. Lewin has published in monetary economics, human capital, the economics of discrimination, organizational and managerial economics and a variety of other subjects, but is best known for his work on capital theory (Capital in Disequilibrium, 2011 [1999]). His work on capital, and its relation to the theory of the firm, has led to some related contributions in the management studies literature.

Dr. Ravi Narayan is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Information Technology and Management area at the Jindal School of Management. He is also the Director of the Master of Science in Business Analytics program. He has 18 years of diverse experiences in consulting, business development and training in the areas of IT Service Management and Governance, Customer Relationship Management and Analytics, and Instructional Technology. His teaching and research interests are in IT Service Management, Enterprise Architecture, Data Management and Governance. He earned a BE in Industrial Engineering from Bangalore University, an MS in Computer Systems from Louisiana State University and a PhD from The University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Nhut Nguyen holds BS, MS and Ph.D. degrees, all in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Tokyo in Japan, and has extensive industry experience working for IBM Japan, Bell-Northern Research, Nortel and Samsung in various Research and Development (R&D) roles. In the last few years he has been involved in many Standard Developing Organizations (SDOs) to develop new standards for the IT industry, and has served as Rapporteur for the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and as Editor for the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG). He has been an adjunct faculty for the Computer Science department of University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), the Electrical Engineering Department of Southern Methodist University (SMU) and University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) starting from 2001, before his current assignment as a teaching faculty with the Computer Science Department of UTD. His expertise areas include large systems, telecommunications technologies, wireless systems, networking protocols, network security and multimedia. Dr. Nguyen is the holder of twelve United States patents, as well as several international patents in the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and South Korea. He is also active in academia serving as Technical Program Committee member for several international conferences, most recently for the Eleventh International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Communications, the ICWMC 2015.

Dr. Mike Peng the O.P. Jindal Chair of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas; a National Science Foundation CAREER Award winner; and a Fellow of the Academy of International Business (AIB). He received his PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1996. He is widely regarded as one of the most prolific and most influential scholars in global strategy—both the United Nations and the World Bank have cited his work. He was recently ranked #4 on a list of most impactful management scholars in the world (based upon citations and Google searches) among those who received their PhDs after 1991. Among his over 150 publications, his textbooks—Global Strategy, Global Business, and GLOBAL—are used in over 30 countries (in Chinese, English, Portuguese, and Spanish). He was Editor-in-Chief of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management, and is currently Senior Editor at the Journal of World Business. He has consulted for multinationals (such as Texas Instruments and AstraZeneca), governments (such as the UK Government Office for Science), and international organizations (such as the World Bank). At Jindal, he is area coordinator for the Organizations, Strategy, and International Management (OSIM) area, and teaches in the MBA, EMBA, GLEMBA, and PhD programs.

Erik Reynolds is Director of Regulatory & Compliance at Atmos Energy, the nation’s largest natural gas only utility. His responsibilities have included system safety initiatives through Geographic Information Systems (GIS), aerial patrol, ground-based survey, pipeline inline inspection, and risk assessment. Prior to Atmos, Erik developed a new global service offering in system safety consulting for Intertek, the world’s largest assurance, testing, inspection and certification organization. His previous experience also includes operational test and evaluation of the MQ-9 Reaper Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) for the US Air Force. Erik holds an MS in Engineering Systems Management and BS in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University, and is a PhD ABD in Systems and Engineering Management from Texas Tech University. Erik is a Project Management Professional (PMP), a Certified Functional Safety Expert (CFSE) and a licensed Professional Engineer (PE) in the state of Texas.

Scott R. Sanderson joined the faculty of the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2002 as an Adjunct Professor teaching financial management courses.  He is also an Adjunct Professor for the University of Texas at Austin Professional MBA program taught in Mexico City.  He has lectured in finance and banking for over 10 years in the UT system, earning teacher of the year awards.  As a Senior Vice President with Citigroup, one of the world’s largest financial institutions, he has received Citi’s top award for leadership and excellence three times in the last decade.  He currently oversees the Citi credit card program relationship for two of the largest oil companies in the U.S.  Prior to his current position, he served as the CFO for the Fuels division within Citi Cards. Previously, he held senior leadership positions in start-up telecommunications firms where he gained experience in financial restructuring and business plan evaluation.  He has also held financial positions at Verizon and American Airlines.  Sanderson has an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago and a BA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  He is also a Certified Public Accountant.

Dr. Jay (James) Scott holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Public Affairs from the Graduate School of Economic, Political & Policy Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Scott holds MS degrees with honors from UTD in Business Analytics, Information Technology Management, Healthcare Management and International Management from The University of Texas at Dallas. In addition, Dr. Scott holds an MBA with honors from The University of Dallas, and a BS is in Chemical Engineering from Texas Tech University. Dr. Scott continues to teach part-time at UTD in two separate Executive Education degree programs, MS Financial Engineering and Risk Management and MS Business Analytics. Besides academic publishing, Dr. Scott has been the Chief Data Scientist for the Center for Financial Strategy Innovation at UTD.

Avanti Sethi

Gaurav Shekhar

Dr. Prakash Shrivastava holds MS and PhD degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University, and a master’s degree in MSE (management of technology) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a master’s degree in electrical engineering (computers and controls) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and a bachelor’s degree in electronics and communication engineering from Jabalpur University, India. He worked as a senior scientific officer at the Aeronautical Development Establishment, Bangalore, India for seven years in the areas of flight test and flight-control systems. Subsequently, he spent 22 years in various capacities at the General Motor’s Research Laboratories, Advanced Engineering Staff, Systems Engineering Center, Global Engineering, and Global Quality Organizations at GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. From 1994 to 2000, Dr. Shrivastava also served as an adjunct faculty member at Wayne State University, Michigan, where he taught graduate courses in manufacturing strategy in the Industrial Engineering Department and modern control systems in the Mechanical Engineering Department. He was an adjunct faculty member of the School of Business Administration at Oakland University, where he taught MBA courses on Data Mining / decision support systems. He is now a Clinical Professor at the Jindal School of Management, where he teaches courses in Business Analytics, Supply Chain Analytics, Information Technology for Business.” His areas of interest are in the areas of Digital Transformation, Industry 4.0,  Industrial Internet of Things,  Quality Management and Control,  Modeling, analysis, simulation of business strategies, systems and processes.

Dr. Mark W. Spong is dean of the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and holder of the Lars Magnus Ericsson Chair in Electrical Engineering and the Excellence in Education Chair at The University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to 2008, he was the Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His main interests are in nonlinear control theory and robotics. He has published more than 250 papers and four books in the area. Spong is past president of the IEEE Control Systems Society and past editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology. His recent awards include the 2007 IROS Fumio Harashima Award for Innovative Technologies, the Senior Scientist Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the John R. Ragazzini Award and O. Hugo Schuck Award from the American Automatic Control Council and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal. Spong is a Fellow of the IEEE and president of Mechatronic Systems, Inc., a company that he founded in 1996.

Dr. James Szot is director of the Naveen Jindal School of Management Professional Education graduate program in project management. He earned a PhD in Strategy, Programme and Project Management at Skema Business School, a Master of Science in Management and Administrative Science with an emphasis in organizational development and change management at The University of Texas at Dallas, a MBA with an emphasis in engineering management at the University of Dallas, and a Master of Engineering (Electrical) and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering at Cornell University. He is a Project Management Institute certified project management professional and a registered professional engineer and licensed real estate broker in the State of Texas. He is a Director and past Chair of the Project Management Institute Global Accreditation Center (GAC) for Project Management Education Programs. Prior to his academic role, Szot held various management and engineering positions at Texas Instruments and NCR. His experience includes leading corporate development programs in 17 countries across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America. He previously served the community as a member of the Sachse, Texas, City Council, Planning and Zoning Commission and Economic Development Corporation.

Dr. W. Eric Wong received his PhD in computer science from Purdue University. He is a professor and the director of International Outreach in Computer Science at UT Dallas. He also has an appointment as a guest researcher from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Prior to joining UT Dallas, he was with Telcordia (Bellcore) as a senior research scientist and the project manager in charge of the initiative for Dependable Telecom Software Development. Wong’s research focus is on the technology to help practitioners improve the quality of software while simultaneously reducing the cost of development. In particular, he is working on software testing, debugging, risk analysis/metrics, safety/security and reliability. He has extensive experience developing real-life industry applications of his research results. Since 2003, he has received funding from such organizations as the National Science Foundation, NASA, Avaya, IBM, Texas Instruments, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, Hewlett-Packard, Hyundai Motor Company and others. He has published more than 150 papers. He is a recipient of the Quality Assurance Special Achievement Award from Johnson Space Center, NASA (1997). He also serves as the vice president of the IEEE Reliability Society and the secretary of ACM SIGAPP, and he is the founding Steering Committee chair of the IEEE International Conference on Software Security and Reliability (SERE).

Dr. Laurie Ziegler is a Clinical Professor in the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. She joined the faculty in 1993 after receiving her Ph.D. in Business Administration and M.S. in Human Resource Management from the University of Texas at Arlington. After helping to establish the Undergraduate Honor’s Program, she now specializes in negotiation, teaching in several Graduate and Professional Education programs. She uses both the flipped and blended approaches in her course delivery incorporating blogs, asynchronous and synchronous simulations to supplement her multi-media files. She also has a consulting firm, Laurie Ziegler, Inc. which provides human behavior advice to companies such as Raytheon, Texas Instruments and others in the manufacturing sector. Laurie’s research interests and publications are in the area of individual differences, social support and conflict management. She is a member of several professional organizations, including the Academy of Management, Golden Key Honor Society and the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.

Evening view of UTD campus building

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