FEATURED FACULTY

Our professors—who also teach in UNC Kenan-Flagler’s other top-ranked MBA programs1—bring unique perspectives, cultural awareness and real-world experience to the online classroom. Many consult with major corporations and executives, allowing them to stay current with business issues and trends around the world.

Keep reading to meet just a few of these esteemed teachers and researchers, or view a full list of MBA@UNC faculty ▸ 

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.

Sridhar Balasubramanian’s teaching and research interests are in marketing and technology strategy, customer focus, innovation and growth strategy, services design and marketing, e-business, customer relationship management, game theory, and the management of competition. He specializes in bringing the tools and concepts of market-focus and customer-focus into other functional areas, including the management of the human resource function.

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.

Mabel Miguel teaches leadership and management courses for MBA students and executives. She shares her global expertise and experiences by infusing leadership lessons that transcend geographical and cultural boundaries. She has developed and taught leadership skill courses for the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, ExxonMobil, Sony Ericsson, CenturyLink, CEMEX, Eastman Chemical and the Environmental Protection Agency, among many others.

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 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 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.

Alison Fragale teaches courses on effective leadership and negotiation skills to graduate students and executives. An award-winning teacher, her research focuses on the determinants and consequences of power, status and influence in organizations; conflict resolution and negotiation; and verbal and nonverbal communication. Previously she worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company Inc.

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.

View a full list of MBA@UNC faculty ▸