FEATURED FACULTY

Tanja
Snively

Tanja Snively is an award-winning teacher of accounting. She was working as a financial accountant when UNC Kenan-Flagler recruited her as one of the first professors to teach in MBA@UNC when it launched in 2011. She worked in public and private accounting, and served as BKD LLP auditor, a Monroe Bank controller and as legal entity controller for Credit Suisse.

Sekou
Bermiss

Sekou Bermiss’ research examines how strategic human capital (including founders, executives and employees) shapes firm performance, innovation and organizational outcomes. He also studies how political ideology, status and diversity influence organizational decision-making and stakeholder reactions. Dr. Bermiss teaches courses in people analytics, managing human capital, leading for impact and organizational theory and design.

Brad
Staats

Brad Staats examines how individuals and organizations learn and improve to stay relevant, innovate and succeed. His teaching focuses on learning and analytics. He works with companies around the world on their learning and analytics strategies with a particular focus in healthcare. His work integrates operations management and human behavior to understand how individuals, teams and organizations can perform their best.

Olga
Hawn

The research of Olga Hawn lies at the intersection of strategy and organization theory, business and society. In particular, Dr. Hawn is engaged in multidisciplinary research on non-market strategy, including environmental, social and corporate governance activities of the firm with a focus on the strategic impact of such activities, their antecedents and consequences in developed and emerging markets.

Atul
Nerkar

Atul Nerkar teaches strategic planning and decision-making skills. He is an expert on how technology, innovation and entrepreneurship affect business strategy. He studies research productivity in organizations and the evolution of technological capabilities in the pharmaceutical, chemical and optical disc industries. In particular, he focuses on firms’ patent portfolios and the evolutionary process underlying their development.

Mark
McNeilly 

Mark McNeilly teaches marketing and leadership courses at UNC Kenan-Flagler. He brings his expertise as a global marketing executive with IBM and Lenovo to his teaching. His background includes branding, strategy, marketing, market intelligence, management, manufacturing and personnel. Mark wrote Sun Tzu and the Art of Business: Six Strategic Principles for Managers and George Washington and the Art of Business.

Adam Mersereau

Adam Mersereau teaches analytics, decision modeling and operations management. He researches data-driven dynamic optimization—how decision-makers who have uncertainty about their business environment can both use existing data now and gather new data for the future. He addresses problems in retail operations management, revenue management and supply chain management.

Ivonne Chirino-Klevans 

Ivonne Chirino-Klevans teaches courses on managerial decision making and leadership; her research is widely published, including several books on cross-cultural leadership. As an executive coach, she has consulted extensively with global organizations on a variety of leadership topics. She received the 2022 Distinguished Mexican Award for cross-cultural conflict management simulations. She’s recognized for mentoring Latinx students and resilience coaching. A former Pan American Games medalist and All-American athlete, she brings unique perspectives to leadership and diversity.

Sreedhari Desai

Sreedhari Desai researches how individuals behave in organizations, with a focus on ethical decision making, fairness and gender diversity. She investigates broadly the role of ethical nudges or non-coercive ways of leading people down moral pathways. In her work on fairness, she examines how recalling unfair experiences from the past causes people to behave more fairly toward others. She also explores the influence of traditional marriage structures on egalitarian attitudes toward working women.