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Experts
Gabrielle Adams
Associate Professor of Business Administration
Adams is a behavioral scientist with a joint appointment at two University of Virginia schools: the Darden School of Business and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. She also holds a courtesy appointment at UVA’s Department of Psychology. An expert in interpersonal dynamics, social exchange, conflict resolution and decision-making, she studies psychological inefficiencies and what gives rise to ‘good’ decisions, policies and conditions in organizations.
Adams received UVA's All-University Teaching Award in 2021 and was named one of the 40 Best Business School Professors Under 40 by Poets & Quants. Her work has been published in journals such as Nature, Psychological Science, the Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. It has also been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review.
B.A., Colby College; Ph.D., Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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
Lester F. Alexander III
John Glynn Endowed Professor and Professor of Practice in Business Administration
Les Alexander is the John Glynn Endowed Professor and a Professor of Practice in the Finance and Strategy, Ethics & Entrepreneurship areas at Darden. He is an experienced professor, venture capital and private equity investor, corporate executive, and investment banker. As a partner with Jefferson Capital Partners, he has completed venture capital, growth capital, and control equity investments in a variety of privately owned businesses. Alexander serves on the board of directors of several Jefferson Capital portfolio companies where he is involved in strategic planning and corporate governance. Prior to joining Jefferson Capital, he was an investment professional at Advantage Capital Partners financing private businesses and serving on the boards of several portfolio companies.
Before joining Darden, Alexander was a professor at Tulane University and Loyola University in New Orleans. He has taught graduate, undergraduate, and executive MBA classes in finance and management including Venture Capital and Private Equity, Investment Banking, Cases in Finance, Entrepreneurial Finance, Advanced Financial Management, Investments, and Entrepreneurship.
Alexander served as president of Ferrara Fire Apparatus, a leading fire truck and emergency vehicle manufacturer. At Ferrara, he was responsible for 450 employees producing over 300 vehicles annually for its domestic and international customers.
As an investment banker for 15 years with Howard Weil, Southcoast Capital, and J.C. Bradford, Alexander completed over 50 public offerings, private placements, and merger and acquisition transactions for public and private companies in many different industries.
Alexander is a governing board member of the Small Business Investor Alliance (SBIA) and serves on its executive committee. He founded the Louisiana chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), served as its first chapter president, and remains a board member. He was the ACG Global Chairman of Finance, an executive committee member, a global board member, and Chairman of the 2016 ACG InterGrowth conference. Alexander received the ACG global Meritorious Service Award and the ACG Louisiana Outstanding Service Award. He is a frequent speaker on private equity, venture capital, M&A, and other finance topics at conferences, meetings, and seminars.
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 Times, The 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
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
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 and a chaired professor in the Strategy, Ethics and Entrepreneurship area. A former senior executive, he acts as CEO of the financially self-sufficient Darden enterprise (School and Foundation). Since 2015, as chief fundraiser, he has helped raise a record $500 million in gifts and endowment to launch initiatives in venture capital, real estate and AI, and an institute for lifelong learning; hire 50 faculty; build a Collaboratory with the School of Data Science; boost faculty research support 400%; deliver record global diversity; and achieve record student excellence and financial aid. He gained approval from UVA’s board for a new campus masterplan and led ─ from vision to completion ─ the opening of UVA Darden DC Metro, a Washington, D.C-area campus enabling new EMBA, MSBA and Part-Time MBA offerings; a $150 million Darden hotel and conference center with adjacent arboretum and botanical gardens; and alumni hall. An expert in strategy, stakeholder management, regulation, and leadership development, he now researches and teaches on maximizing human potential; CEO leadership; and technology and AI regulation.
Until 2015, Beardsley was a senior partner and elected global board member at McKinsey & Co. During his 26 years with the firm ─ 24 based in Belgium ─ he was among the fastest to rise to senior partner, holding some of the firm’s most senior roles. His transition to higher education follows his passion for scholarship and for helping people and organizations achieve their full potential. He wrote about the rise of nontraditional leaders in academia in his 2017 book, Higher Calling (UVA Press).
Beardsley holds a doctorate in Higher Education Management with distinction from The University of Pennsylvania, which awarded him the 2022 Distinguished Alumni Award. He earned an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School with highest honors as the Henry S. Dupont III Scholar and a B.S. in electrical engineering magna cum laude, Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu from Tufts University as the Eastman Kodak Scholar. He is currently pursuing research toward a Master in Practical Ethics degree (part-time) in the Department of Philosophy at University of Oxford’s Pembroke College.
Originally from a family of educators and dairy farmers, Beardsley was born in Maine and grew up in Vermont and Alaska. He is a French and U.S. citizen, is bilingual in English and French, and resides in Charlottesville 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
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.
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 Discoveries, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, as well as featured in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, Fortune, 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
Samuel E. Bodily
John Tyler Professor Emeritus 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
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 Acquisitions, Strategic 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