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Experts
Alex Cowan
Batten Fellow and General Faculty
Cowan is an expert in digital innovation, agile and lean methodologies, and entrepreneurship. He teaches multiple courses in Darden’s Technology and Operations Management area, as well as the massive open online course specialization “Agile Development” (one of Coursera’s Top 15 specializations) and “Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals.”
Author of the book Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software, Cowan is also an experienced entrepreneur and intrapreneur who now divides his time between instructing, advising and consulting. He delves into venture design, his systematic approach to developing new products and businesses, on www.alexandercowan.com.
Cowan studied industrial engineering and economics at Stanford University.
Ramona Dagostino
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Ramona Dagostino is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business.
Prof. Dagostino‘s main areas of interest are municipal finance and empirical corporate finance. Her recent work studies how partisanship influences asset prices and the allocation of capital in the economy. Her research has been featured by various media outlets, including The Economist, and it has been presented at leading conferences, such as the American Finance Association, the European Finance Association, as well as at central banks and universities worldwide.
Prof. Dagostino regularly provides advice to local governments and grassroots organizations on a range of issues pertaining to municipal finance.
Prior to joining Darden, Prof. Dagostino taught graduate courses in Risk Management and Empirical Corporate Finance at the University of Rochester, Simon Business School. Prof. Dagostino holds a PhD in Finance from the London Business School.
Martin N. Davidson
Senior Associate Dean and Global Chief Diversity Officer; Johnson & Higgins Professor Business Administration
Davidson is an expert on global leadership with an emphasis on how to manage diversity to generate superior performance — an approach he pioneered called Leveraging Difference. He wrote the book on diversity in business, The End of Diversity as We Know It: Why Diversity Efforts Fail and How Leveraging Difference Can Succeed. He’s experienced in helping senior leaders develop the skills they need to thrive in global environments.
Davidson consults with a host of Fortune 500 firms, government agencies and social profit organizations. He has served as chief diversity officer for the Darden School, and as the national chair of the Gender and Diversity in Organizations Division of the Academy of Management. Davidson writes a blog called “In My Opinion,” found at www.leveragingdifference.com.
A.B., Harvard College; Ph.D., Stanford University
Edward W. Davis
Oliver Wight Professor Emeritus of Business Administration
Davis is an authority on supply chain management, operations strategy and global sourcing, with a particular focus on the automotive industry and global manufacturing. The author of more than 100 case studies, Davis has authored or co-authored three books on supply chain management, project management and production management.
Now professor emeritus, Davis served as head of the Technology & Operations Management academic area at Darden. He joined the Darden faculty in 1978 after teaching at Harvard Business School, the MIT Sloan School of Management and the University of North Carolina. He performed postgraduate study at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Degrees: B.S., MSIE, Georgia Institute of Technology; MPhil, Ph.D., Yale University
Peter Debaere
Tipton R. Snavely Professor of Business Administration
Debaere is a leading international economist, with a focus on international trade, multinationals and trade policy. His work addresses fundamental questions about the extent to which trade theories can explain actual international trade patterns. He has also examined the specific impact of trade policies on trade flows and international prices, as well as on the operations of multinational corporations. In recent years, Debaere has also been researching the economics of water.
B.A., KUL, Belgium; M.A., Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
James R. Detert
John L. Colley Professor of Business Administration
An expert on leadership and ethics, Detert’s research focuses on workplace courage, why people do or don’t speak up, and ethical decision-making and behavior. His research and consulting have been conducted across a variety of global high-technology and service-oriented industries, in addition to public sector institutions, including K–12 education.
Detert has received awards for his teaching in MBA and Executive MBA programs, as well as academic best paper awards for his work, which appears in many online and print media outlets. Prior to coming to Darden, he taught at the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University.
BBA, University of Wisconsin; MBA, University of Minnesota; M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University
Shane Dikolli
Bank of America Associate Professor of Business Administration
An expert in executive compensation, managerial performance evaluation and corporate performance measurement, Dikolli’s research focuses on the performance evaluation of CEOs. His work has been featured in both practitioner-oriented and peer-reviewed academic publications, and he is a member of the editorial boards of numerous academic journals. Additionally, he has served as the president of the American Accounting Association’s Management Accounting Section.
Prior to joining Darden, Dikolli was a member of the Accounting faculty at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business, where he also served as associate dean of faculty engagement. The recipient of a number of teaching awards, he was recognized by Bloomberg Businessweek for being among the Top 5 Most Popular Business Professors across all disciplines in the Top 30 U.S. business schools.
B.Bus., P.Grad Dip.Bus., Curtin University of Technology; Ph.D., University of Waterloo
Kenneth M. Eades
Professor Emeritus of Business Administration
Eades’ broad expertise covers corporate finance issues including dividend policy, mergers and acquisitions, investments, defined benefit pensions and pricing of convertible securities. He is also the author of 50 Darden cases.
In 2013 Eades wrote “Best Practices in Estimating the Cost of Capital: Survey and Synthesis” with Todd Brotherson, Robert Harris, and Robert Higgins in the Journal of Applied Finance. He also contributed to the popular book The Portable MBA, Fifth Edition, with Timothy Laseter, Ian Skurnik, Peter Rodriguez, Lynn Isabella and Paul Simko.
B.S., University of Kentucky; Ph.D., Purdue University
Allison Elias
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Elias teaches communication and negotiation, with particular expertise in storytelling, careers, and conflict. Her research investigates historical and contemporary issues of gender and diversity in occupations and organizations, with a focus on the influence of social movements on corporate practices. Elias’ book was named a Best Summer Book of 2023: Business by the Financial Times and was a finalist for the Hagley Prize, awarded by the Business History Conference, for the best book in business history.
Before coming to Darden, Elias taught at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University; the SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University; and the ILR School, Cornell University.
B.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia
Lillien Ellis
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
As an expert in creativity and innovation, entrepreneurship, and ethical decision-making, Lillien Ellis investigates where creative, cutting-edge ideas come from and how they are advanced successfully. Ellis is particularly interested in the psychology of intellectual property ownership, protection, and theft, and the consequences of “idea theft” in contemporary knowledge work.
Ellis has received several grants and awards for research conducted by her lab, the Ellis Idea Lab, which she founded in 2017. In 2020, she was awarded the General Mills Award for Exemplary Teaching at Cornell University. She plays an active role in the intellectual property community as an adviser and research consultant to inventor organizations and entrepreneurs. Her work has been published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, as well as The Oxford Handbook of Group Creativity and Innovation. It has also been featured in industry outlets such as Inc.
B.S., M.S. and Ph.D., Cornell University