Alaka Rao

Alaka Rao will join the Organization and Management Department in the area of International Business. Alaka received her B.A. in economics from UC Berkeley and is completing her Ph.D. at the Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine. Alaka's research centers on the management of complex collaborations across geographical and cultural divides. Her current research focuses on how local and global pressures influence the performance of global outsourcing relationships. This research examines the critical role of national culture, employee cognition, and trust in the management of global collaborations. Alaka has also conducted research on how managers exchange and build trust in countries lacking institutional support. Her work has been published in the Journal of International Business Studies and presented at the annual Academy of Management meetings.

Isabelle Lescent-Giles

Isabelle Lescent-Giles holds a PhD in economic history from the Sorbonne and has taught for 15 years at Oxford University in the UK, at the Sorbonne in France, and at NYU-Stern School of Business in New York. She was educated in France, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne. After teaching at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and completing her PhD in 1992 on the impact of breakthrough innovation on the UK iron and steel industry, she worked for McKinsey for three years, with a focus on the turnaround of industrial firms and change management. She then joined the Sorbonne as an assistant professor, teaching for ten years at undergraduate and graduate level and researching the impact of radical innovation on the strategies and structures of industry leaders in Europe. She published extensively on the role of national, professional and firm cultures in shaping strategies and driving or slowing down change. She is currently comparing the use of information and communication technologies by leading global food retailers such as Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco. Isabelle moved to New York in 2005 and spent a year as a visiting research fellow at Columbia University, collaborating with the Center for the Study of Europe on seminars and conferences on differences in business strategies and cultures across Europe and the US, looking at innovation, marketing strategies and accounting standards, before joining Stern-NYU as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International Business. All through her teaching years, Isabelle kept close contacts with business practitioners. In 2004, she joined a French think tank composed of top managers and public servants to look at ways to boost French competitiveness, traveling to plants, corporate headquarters and universities across Europe, the US and Asia to look for best practice in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship. Since moving to the US, she has worked on several consulting projects for industrial and financial firms and is collaborating with the Conference Board, a leading US think tank, on studies in the fields of global HR, organization and innovation. Isabelle recently moved to the Bay area with her family and is joining the faculty at COB-SJSU in the fall as an Associate Professor of International Business.

Noorein Inamdar

Noorein Inamdar joined the department of Organization and Management as an Assistant Professor in January 2008. Her research work focuses on how executives in diversified health care delivery organizations create incremental economic value from owning multiple businesses. Specifically, in three related papers, she has developed a new taxonomy of corporate strategies, examined how executives create corporate advantage from owning multiple businesses and explored the role of management control systems in aligning strategy with structure. Her work is grounded in the strategy discipline which seeks to understand factors distinguishing performance among firms. Dr. Inamdar holds degrees in Engineering from San Jose State University, an MBA from the University of Chicago, an M.S. in Health Care Management from the Harvard School of Public Health and a Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard University. She also has several years of industry and consulting experience in strategy and operations with numerous firms spanning different industries.

Chunlei Wang

Chunlei Wang received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University, a M.A. in Sociology from the Ohio State University, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Peking University. His academic interests include social networks, innovation diffusion, and the decision making of organizations. A major theoretical theme of his research is to explore how social networks, competitive dynamics, and institutions separately and interactively influence organizational behavior and performance. He is married to Sheri Ying Xie. They have a wonderful daughter, Jackie. He enjoys spending quality time with his family.

Camille Johnson

Camille Johnson received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Ohio State University in 2005. Her primary research focuses broadly on the relationship between social comparisons, motivations and behavior. In addition to her primary interests in social comparison, she has a number of active collaborations and affiliations with researchers involved in a wide variety of research topics like exploring issues surrounding responses to uncertainty and self-doubt and the public policy implications of different perceptions of racial inequality. Her work has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the European Journal of Social Psychology. Prior to receiving her PhD, she studied abroad in China and the Netherlands and was a member of the Teach For America Teacher Corps.

Xiaohong (Iris) Quan

Xiaohong (Iris) Quan holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. She was a SPRIE Fellow at Stanford University (Stanford Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship) before joining San Jose State University as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Quan's research interests are in the fields of technology and innovation management, entrepreneurship, international business, and regional economic development. Her recent research involves topics on, for example, Chinese and Indian immigrant entrepreneurs and professionals in Silicon Valley, multinational corporations' research and development activities in China, and business models and intellectual property protection in the semiconductor industry.

Shu Zhou

Shu Zhou received her Ph.D. in Operations Management in 2007 from Cornell University, the S. C. Johnson Graduate School of Management. Born in Yueyang, Hunan Province, China, she got her bachelor's degree in Management Information Systems from Tsinghua University, China, and a master's degree in Management from Cornell University. Zhou's research interests include supply chain management, inventory control, forecasting, and operations management-marketing interface. She is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society (MSOM), and the Decision Sciences Institute (DSI).

 

 

 

 

 

Lauren Ramsay

Lauren Ramsay joined the department of Organization and Management as an Assistant Professor in January 2008. Her research work is guided by her commitment to improving social justice, and addresses issues of selection, diversity, and fairness in the global workplace. More specifically, her interests are in valid and reliable selection processes that are useful predictors of performance in different contexts; the appropriateness of workplace measures for use across race, gender, and cultural groups; and reactions to work-related policies that have important consequences for individuals, organizations, and society. She is lead author on an article published in Psychology Science and a forthcoming book chapter. Lauren has also contributed to research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, International Journal of Selection and Assessment, and Organizational Research Methods. She is an experienced workplace trainer and had over seven years of full-time experience in industry before pursuing her Ph.D. in industrial/organizational psychology at Michigan State University, which she anticipates completing in 2008. Lauren has lived and worked in South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.