The Saunders Online Executive MBA Program

Ashok Rao joined RIT in 2007 after over 25 years as a faculty member at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., where he was professor of technology operations and information management and served as chair of the school's management division. Rao has also served on the faculty at Northeastern University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In industry, Dr. Rao was director of business systems with Northern Telecom and has prior experience at Canada Packers and Leeds & Northrup. His consulting and research includes new product development, total quality management, computer integrated enterprises and management training. He was president of RAM Systems Inc., a software-consulting firm, and is actively involved in the Center for Quality of Management and The Association for Operations Management (formerly the American Production and Inventory Control Society, APICS).

Dr. Rao earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharaghpur and his MS in electrical engineering and a PhD in industrial and management engineering from the University of Iowa.

Stanley Widrick served as Senior Associate Dean in the Saunders College of Business at Rochester Institute of Technology through August of 2008 and now is Director of the online EMBA Program. He is an expert in developing international business plans based on the theories of marketing, international business and business performance.

Dr. Widrick teaches graduate classes in international marketing, marketing management and business research. In addition to his administrative responsibilities, he has worked as a consultant for a wide variety of industries including Eastman Kodak Company, General Motors, Bausch & Lomb, Rochester Telephone, and numerous other corporations and governmental agencies. He has trained international marketing managers in Latin America, southeast Asia, and eastern and western Europe.

His articles on marketing strategies, pricing decisions and buyer behavior have been published in a variety of journals and conference proceedings including Business & Society, The Journal of Consumer Marketing, Advances in Consumer Research, Journal of Retailing, The Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of Product & Brand Management, and others.

Dr. Widrick has a BS in chemistry from Clarkson University, an MBA from SUNY at Buffalo and a PhD in marketing from Syracuse University.

Donald Wilson is an assistant professor of management in the College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the former Director of Graduate Business Programs at RIT. Dr. Wilson was previously the Director of Technology Management programs in the College of Business and the Team Leader for the Management Department. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Oklahoma State University, an MS in Systems and an MA in Public Administration from the University of Southern California, and a PhD in Management from the University of California.

As a lieutenant colonel, U.S. Air Forces Reserves, Dr. Wilson worked as an electrical engineer on several high priority Defense Department programs for the U.S. Air Force Space Systems Division. He served as an advisor and consultant on implementing an Air Force strategic management and planning system. Dr. Wilson was involved in logistics planning in support of the Strategic Defense Initiative and served as a consultant on implementing Total Quality Management within the Air Force.

His current research interests include strategic management, organizational design issues, and methods of changing communication patterns among scientists and engineers in order to enhance innovation and creativity. He has done extensive research into problems related to organizational management for the U.S. Navy. He is currently under contract with the Navy to evaluate engineering fleet support, including the job performance of engineers working on high-tech weapons systems.

Bob Barbato is a Professor of Management in the Saunders College of Business. His primary teaching and research interests are in the areas of business ethics, entrepreneurship and organizational behavior. Professor Barbato has taught or lectured in Saudi Arabia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, South Korea, Ethiopia and England.

Bob Boehner worked for Xerox for 30 years, holding a variety of senior management positions including VP World Wide Marketing, VP Strategy and VP World Wide Channels Development. He earned his JD from the School of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chaptel Hill in 1999 and his BA and MA in history from Siena College. Professor Boehner has been an adjunct professor in the College of Business at RIT since 1993. He joined the COB faculty as a Visiting Professor in 2005.

Steven Gold is a professor of economics in the Saunders College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His administrative experience includes serving as department chair of finance and accounting for five years, faculty director of the college's management development program, and vice-president of the faculty senate at RIT. The focus of his research has been in the field of business simulations and gaming. He has published over 26 referred journal articles and proceedings on simulation and gaming and on the modeling of demand, production and finance algorithms; he has received three best research paper awards and was recognized as one of the outstanding reviewers in simulation research in 2008. He is the author of four computerized business and economic simulation games with for publishers Macmillan, Random House and McGraw-Hill. His most recent simulation game, "Beat the Market", is an interactive game used for teaching and learning economics.

Dr. Gold is a fellow and past president of the national Association and Experiential Learning (ABSEL). A bibliometric co-citation study cited Steven Gold as one of the most "influential" authors in simulation research with this association. He has received three best research paper awards, and in 2008 was recognized as one of the outstanding reviewers in the simulation research track. He was an associate editor of Simulation & Gaming: An International Journal of Theory, Design, and Research; and is currently one of the reviewers. He received his BA in economics and BS in industrial engineering from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, Canada, and his MA and PhD degrees in economics from the SUNY in Binghamton.

Clyde Hull is a Zutes Faculty Fellow and an Associate Professor in the Rochester Institute of Technology Saunders College of Business, where he teaches classes in Strategy and Innovation and Technology Management at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

He has served as a strategy consultant and a high-technology consultant domestically and internationally for established high-technology firms in the pre-IPO stage, as well as start-ups, and for the United States Government.

Dr. Hull has been invited to deliver presentations on the topics of entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurship, strategic management, business ethics and ethics in a high-technology environment in Singapore, Germany and the United States, and he has presented at conferences all the world.
He earned his BA in philosophy from Yale University and his MBA and PhD degrees from Indiana University.

His research interests include innovation strategy and new product introduction in high-technology settings, digital entrepreneurship, the effects of ecologically friendly strategies on firm performance and global strategy formulation.

Marty Lawlor lectures in Marketing and Management at the E. Philip Saunders College of Business at Rochester Institute of Technology. He has held senior management positions in corporate strategy, competitive intelligence, information research, and business development with leading telecommunications and wireless Internet firms, including Nortel Networks and InfoSpace, Inc., and spent more than a decade in entrepreneurial ventures, including starting up and managing a retail bookstore and founding FYI, an early information brokerage firm. Marty has focused extensively on market and technology topics and has conducted numerous analysis projects to enable more effective decision-making. His work ranges from market assessments, competitive profiles and business cases to vision papers and strategic plan recommendations. He is a member of the American Marketing Association, a board member of the International Resource Group, and was a founding member of the Innovation Roundtable hosted by Idea Connections. Current and recent projects include a market opportunity assessment for the Rochester Tooling & Machining Association and a strategic analysis of business center survey and focus group data for the United States Department of State. He has also conducted multiple strategic plan analyses under a New York State Department of Labor grant administered by the Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies at Rochester Institute of Technology. A recent entrepreneurial venture is a pilot launch of a searchable web-based database of topical news-related media for business school faculty. Marty received his BA in Spanish from the University of Buffalo, and holds an MLS from SUNY at Geneseo and an MBA from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Victor Perotti is an Associate Professor and leads the Digital Business initiative at RIT. He consults on the business implications of new technologies including digital business, digital entrepreneurship, Web 2.0, e-commerce, Web business models and mobile work. His most recent research examines social networks (especially Facebook.com), social computing, Clean Slate Internet approaches, mobile collaboration, digital entrepreneurship, electronic communities and video game business models.

Dr. Perotti is an accomplished communicator and educator, and was awarded RIT's highest honors for teaching, the Richard and Virginia Eisenhart Provost's Award for Excellence in Teaching (2000) and the Eisenhart Award for Outstanding Teaching (2004). His professional speaking engagements include academic conferences, small group meetings and large auditorium lectures.

Before joining RIT, Dr. Perotti completed master's degrees in Computer Science (1990) and Cognitive Psychology (1994) and his PhD in Cognitive Psychology (1997), all at Ohio State University. His doctoral thesis examined the visual perception of 3-D structure from motion information.

Dr. Perotti's consulting work has ranged from conducting advanced business simulation experiences at Harris R.F. to business plan development for pre-seed video game companies to creating multimedia software for David Bowie's "Jump" CD-ROM.

Thomas Pray is a Professor Emeritus at RIT's Saunder's College of Business. For the past 20 years he has focused his research and writing on design, development and use of computerized business simulations. He has co-authored three business simulation books (and the corresponding software). Recently, he has been active in the development of two new microcomputer simulations: DECIDE II, a total enterprise simulation with total quality management, and INNOVATE, a technology management simulation. Dr. Pray's current research and development work deals with developing better algorithms in business simulations. In 1985, Pray's co-authored paper presented at the ABSEL (Association for Business Simulation and Experiential Learning) conference entitled "Modeling Market- and Firm-level Demand in Computerized Business Simulations" was honored as the best research paper. Recent publications include "Modeling Radical Changes in Technology Into Strategy-Oriented Simulations", "The Production Frontier: Modeling Production in Computerized Business Simulations" and "Modeling Total Quality Elements into a Strategy-Oriented Simulation."

He has modified and used his microcomputer version of the DECIDE business simulation to support RIT's and Clarkson University's management and executive development efforts. He has conducted DECIDE-based programs in cooperation with Xerox Corporation - New Build Operations and USCO; Eastman Kodak Company - KAD, Office Imaging, Kodak Park, and Customer Equipment Services, Kodak Colorado Division, and for Kodak Education Resources; CIGNA Corporation; Harris Corporation, and Lapp Insulator Corporation.

Dr. Pray has received two awards for outstanding teaching: RIT's 1985 Eisenhart Award for Outstanding Teaching and, in 1980, the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching awarded while he was at SUNY Geneseo.

He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Clarkson University and his doctorate in managerial economics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Ashok J. Robin is a professor of finance in the College of Business at RIT. Dr. Robin also serves as a Fellow in the Center for International Business. He completed his Ph.D. in finance with a minor in accounting at SUNY at Buffalo in 1988, and before that had earned an MBA in finance at the same school. His undergraduate education is in the area of commerce and accounting, completed at the University of Madras in India. His research interests include corporate governance and international accounting. He has published articles in academic journals such as the Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Financial Research and Financial Management. His teaching interests include corporate finance, international finance and financial derivatives. He has served in the finance department at RIT's College of Business since 1989. Prior to this tenure, he taught for two years at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Sandra Rothenberg is a professor at RIT's Saunders College of Business in the Department of Management. She received her PhD in Organizational Behavior from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management, MS in Technology and Policy, also from MIT, and BS in Bioengineering from Syracuse University.

Dr. Rothenberg was awarded the Sloan Jr. Faculty Fellowship in 2004, the Harvard Global Environmental Assessment Post Doctoral Fellowship in 1998, the Academy of Management ONE Interest Group Service Award in 1997, the Alumni Award for Excellence and Leadership in Technology and Policy in 1992, and the Bernard Rabinowitz Fellowship for Leadership and Service in 1991.

She is currently a researcher for the Printing Industry Center at RIT and the International Motor Vehicle Program at MIT, where her research primarily focuses on corporate environmental strategy and management, lean manufacturing and environmental performance, government regulation and technical innovation, international environmental management, worker participation, and environmental activism within firms. She has also worked as a research associate for the Harvard Global Environmental Assessment Program, U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, and MIT Technology, Business and Environment program.

Daniel Tessoni is an assistant professor of Accounting in the College of Business at RIT and a CPA. He received his PhD in Accounting from Syracuse University, an MS from Clarkson and a bachelor's degree from St. John Fisher College. He has presented seminars and executive programs on accounting and finance-related issues to numerous companies including Constellation Brands, Inc., ITT Industries Eastman Kodak, Xerox, Bausch & Lomb, Chase Manhattan Bank, First Empire State Corporation and Apple Computer.

He served as a member of the Board of Directors of ACC Corp., a publicly held long distance and cellular telephone company from 1987 until 1998 when the company was purchased by ATT. Dr. Tessoni served as chairman of the Audit Committee and as a member of the Compensation Committee and the Executive Committee and several special committees.He currently serves on the board of several privately held corporations.

His research interests are in the areas of agency theory and positive accounting theory.