Experts

The late Professor Rubin (1951–2016) was a Darden faculty member for more than two decades. Area coordinator of the Management Communication area at Darden, Rubin was an expert in corporate communication, media and business relations, and organizational communications theory — the art of successfully communicating within organizations. He used this expertise to consult for communication specialists and give talks on management and corporate communications.

Additionally, Rubin wrote numerous cases on corporate communication, as well as articles on corporate brand and crisis communication. His work has appeared in publications including The Washington Post, the Journal of Brand Management and Strategic Communication Management. He was a member of the Arthur Page Society, the Conference on Corporate Communication, the Corporate Branding Initiative based at the Copenhagen Business School and the Association for Business Communication.

His book, Reset: Business and Society in the New Social Landscape (Columbia Business School Publishing), co-authored with Barie Carmichael, is due out 9 January 2018.

For more on Rubin, please see “In Memoriam: Professor James Richard Rubin.”

Saffie’s research focuses on the intersection of international finance, firm dynamics and economic growth. Methodologically, he combines empirical work with quantitative theory, using granular data to understand aggregate phenomena. He has studied classical topics on international finance using micro data from emerging markets, including the effect of financial crises on productivity in Chile, the transmission of commodity fluctuations through an economy in Brazil, and the effects of financial liberalizations on the allocation of resources in Hungary. His work also examines the political influence of firms in U.S. policy and their effects on the allocation of resources.

Before joining Darden, Saffie was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Maryland.

B.S., M.Sc., Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

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Named one of the Top 18 Entrepreneurship Professors by Fortune Small Business magazine, Sarasvathy is a leading scholar on the cognitive basis for high-performance entrepreneurship. Her work pioneered the logic of effectuation — a set of teachable and learnable principles used by expert entrepreneurs to build enduring ventures.

In addition to being author of the book Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise, Sarasvathy is also co-author of the textbook Effectual Entrepreneurship and the doctoral-level text Made, as Well as Found: Researching Entrepreneurship as a Science of the Artificial.

B.Com., University of Bombay, India; MSIA, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University

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Schill is an authority on international corporate finance, stock market anomalies and business valuation.

Schill is co-author of the book Case Studies in Finance: Managing for Corporate Value Creation with Darden Dean Emeritus Robert F. Bruner and Darden Professor Ken Eades. Recent research articles include “The Post-Acquisition Returns of Stock Deals: Evidence of the Pervasive Nature of the Asset Growth Effect,” published in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis and “The Nature of the Foreign Listing Premium: A Cross-Country Examination,” published in The Journal of Banking and Finance.

B.Sc., Brigham Young University; MBA, INSEAD; Ph.D., University of Washington

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Ronald Edward Trzcinski Professor Emeritus of Business Administration

Sihler is an authority on financial management, financial service organizations — such as banks, investments banks and insurance companies — and small enterprise finance. He also is an expert in turnarounds and workouts — the practice of reviving businesses in financial peril.

Sihler has prepared many cases and written numerous books and articles on corporate financial management and financial service organizations, and provides management and educational counseling to a variety of businesses and financial institutions. He co-authored the book Realism in Lending: Anchor Your Bank in a Sound Credit Culture, published in 2011 by The Risk Management Association.

A.B., MBA, DBA, Harvard University

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Simko is an authority on capital markets, financial accounting, corporate financial reporting and disclosure, and enterprise risk management.

Broadly, Simko’s research examines issues related to financial accounting information. He is particularly interested in topics related to how alternative accounting treatments affect the decisions of investors and financial analysts and how investors assess firms’ earnings quality. His current research examines the incentives and consequences of earnings management and valuation issues pertaining to earnings volatility and growth.

B.A., M.Acc., University of Florida; Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin

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Snell is an expert in strategic human resource management — helping organizations compete better through people. He specializes in talent management, human capital strategy and organizational capability.

His research focuses on the mechanisms by which organizations generate, transfer and integrate new knowledge for competitive advantage. He is co-author of four books: Managing People and Knowledge in Professional Service Firms; Management: Leading and Collaborating in a Competitive World; M: Management; and Managing Human Resources.

Snell has worked with companies including AstraZeneca, Deutsche Telekom, Shell and United Technologies to help employees maximize their talents in order to drive firm performance. He recently co-authored “Intellectual Capital Configurations and Organizational Capability: An Empirical Examination of Human Resource Subunits in the Multinational Enterprise,” published in the Journal of International Business Studies.

B.A., Miami University; MBA, Ph.D., Michigan State University

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Robert Spekman is the Tayloe Murphy Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. He is a recognized authority on business-to-business marketing strategy, channels of distribution design and the implementation of go-to-market strategies. Spekman is also well-known for his research and corporate consultancy work in strategic alliances, partnerships and supply chain management. In 2004, he was named a Fellow to the Institute for the Study of Business Markets at the Pennsylvania State University Smeal College of Business.

Spekman has worked with many of the Fortune 100 businesses, as well as with a number of non-U.S. based global firms. The author of more than 100 articles and papers, he has also written/edited eight books and monographs. His Alliance Competence book was published by John Wiley in 2000 and his most recent book, The Extended Enterprise, was published by Prentice Hall/Financial Times in 2003.

B.S., University of Massachusetts, Amherst; MBA, Syracuse University; Ph.D., Northwestern University

As executive director of the Richard A. Mayo Center for Asset Management, Rodney Sullivan has primary leadership and managerial responsibility for the administration and oversight of all of the center’s activities. He is an investment industry leader with an extensive track record of developing and communicating innovative research and ideas.

An expert in supply chain management, Thomas researches production and inventory planning across the extended enterprise, as well as connecting decision models to logistics performance measurement. He is co-founder and chief scientist for Plan2Execute, which provides supply chain software and consulting solutions in warehouse management, transportation management and advanced production and inventory planning. 

Prior to joining the Darden faculty, Thomas taught at the Smeal college of Business at Penn State and served as a visiting faculty member at INSEAD and Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. 

B.S., Cornell University; M.S., Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology

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