Faculty and Staff
Faculty
Amanda Bower
Charles C. Holbrook, Jr. ‘72 Professor of Business Administration and Head of the Business Administration Department
- Williams School 336
- Email: bowera@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8615
Bower teaches courses in marketing management and creative strategic planning. She has studied the relationship between the liberal arts and a business environment, which gives her courses an interdisciplinary aspect.
Joel Adams
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 124
- Email: jadams2@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8627
Benedikt Alberternst
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 208
- Email: balberternst@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-5323
Zefeng Bai
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 205
- Email: zbai@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8611
Nathan Bowden
Visiting Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 219
- Email: bowdenn@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8013
Professor Bowden is an attorney, educator, and consultant whose primary research interests involve how we regulate financial institutions and other businesses that offer products and services to consumers. His teaches courses about conflict of laws, secured transactions, and financial regulation in the U.S.
Andi Coulter
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 334
- Email: acoulter@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8922
Professor Coulter teaches business communication and social media strategy. Her research interests include the music industry, user-centered design, and social sustainability in art. Professor Coulter wrote a book for the 33 1/3 music series on the New York underground band Suicide, and her current research looks at short-form video and engagement analytics.
Michelle Cowan
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 226
- Email: mcowan@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8254
Anushka Daunt
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Holekamp Hall 108
- Email: adaunt@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8613
Justin Davis
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 227
- Email: jdavis2@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8328
Gavin Fox
Associate Professor of Business Administration
- Holekamp Hall 309
- Email: foxg@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8018
Fox teaches marketing and works extensively with the entrepreneurship faculty. His background is in supply chain management and he served a tour in Iraq as a quartermaster First Lieutenant in 2004. He researches viral marketing.
Bright Frimpong
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 225
- Email: bfrimpong@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8036
Elisabeth Gilbert
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 318
- Email: egilbert@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-5076
Gilbert teaches courses in the area of organizational behavior. Her research focuses on how people can improve their experiences at work, including such topics as voice, employee well-being and constructive deviance in organizations.
Andrew Hess
Associate Provost for Academic Development and Operations and Ehrick Kilner Haight Sr. Term Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 309
- Email: hessa@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8346
Hess is a 1997 alum who researches and teaches in areas of social innovation, strategy and international business. Before returning to W&L, he worked for Fleet National Bank and Silicon Valley Bank in Boston.
Charlotte Hoopes
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 209
- Email: choopes@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8069
Lingshu Hu
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School Building 320
- Email: lhu@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8383
With a PhD in journalism focusing on computational methods and a graduate certificate in AI and Machine Learning, Professor Hu’s primary teaching interests include making data analytics accessible to 91´«Ã½ in the social sciences and helping 91´«Ã½ master storytelling skills with data analytics and visualization.
Emily Landry
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Holekamp Hall 307
- Email: elandry@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8608
Keri M. Larson
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 335
- Email: larsonk@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8601
Larson teaches courses that help 91´«Ã½ learn to understand and use data in areas of management. She has researched the analytics of unstructured textual data to support organizational decision making.
Jayson Margalus
Johnson Professor of Entrepreneurship and Leadership and Director of the Connolly Center for Entrepreneurship
- Hopkins House 201
- Email: jmargalus@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8610
Soo Yon Ryu
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 131
- Email: sryu@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-4285
Jeffrey Schatten
Associate Professor of Business Administration
- Hopkins House 202
- Email: schattenj@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8407
Professor Schatten teaches courses on organizational behavior, leadership and decision making, as well as a unique class composed of 91´«Ã½ and inmates and taught at a minimum-security prison near Lexington.
Robert D. Straughan
Crawford Family Dean of the Williams School and Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 110
- Email: straughanr@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8609
Straughan teaches corporate responsibility and marketing and has authored dozens of studies on sustainable business and cross-cultural business. He has served as Dean of the Williams School since 2015 and worked briefly for Shell Oil’s Refining and Marketing Division prior to entering academia.
Pooja Thakur-Wernz
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
- Williams School 217
- Email: pthakur-wernz@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8932
Thakur-Wernz is a strategic management and international business educator and scholar. Her research focuses on the impact of strategic choices made by firms, such as offshoring, outsourcing and international expansion, on the innovation of firms, especially in the pharmaceutical industry.
Emeritus Faculty
Robert M. Ballenger
Emeritus Professor of Business Administration
Ballenger is a 1976 W&L alumnus who teaches courses in accounting information systems, data analytics and multimedia design. He previously worked for Unisys Corporation and served as the executive vice president of ServNET Technologies.
Roger A. Dean
Emeritus Professor of Business Administration
Dennis Garvis
Emeritus Professor of Business Administration
Garvis taught courses in applied statistics as well as business management. He has researched effective teaching and learning, corporate governance, and entrepreneurial collaborations.
Sandy Reiter
Emeritus Associate Professor of Business Administration
Reiter teaches Business Ethics and Economic Globalization. She has most recently been investigating the question of whether corporations themselves can bear a kind of moral responsibility that is different from that held by corporate actors. Previously, she had an extensive career in the aerospace industry.
Staff
Alexis Johnson
Administrative Assistant to Business Administration Faculty
- Williams School 322
- Email: sjohnson2@wlu.edu
- Phone: 540-458-8630