About

WPI is the business school for engineers, scientists, and change makers.

WPI's Business School works at the cross-section of business, innovation, STEM, and society. Students at The Business School at WPI acquire a transformative skillset that they can't find anywhere else. 

Location: Washburn 215

Vision

Bridging business and technology to develop globally responsible leaders who shape the world.

 

Mission

The WPI Business School develops adaptive leaders who create sustainable solutions, deliver globally responsible impact, and conduct transformative research at the intersection of business, technology, and people.

 

Top 25

online MBA business schools

Poets&Quants (2022)
#20

top undergraduate business schools

Poets&Quants (2021)

Social Responsibility

The WPI Business School follows the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME). Read the PRME Report (PDF).

WPI Impact Report 

The WPI Impact Report for 2018 is available here as a PDF

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Hansong Pu
Hansong Pu
Adjunct Teaching Professor,
The Global School

Dr. Hansong Pu has decades of managerial and entrepreneurial experience with international corporations and small businesses. He has been teaching courses in financial management, investment, ID2050 and Interactive Qualification Project (IQP) at WPI for more than a decade. He worked with his colleagues at WPI to start collaboration programs with Hangzhou Dianzi University (HDU) in China that serve the students and the faculties of both universities, including the Hangzhou IQP Center. For the past four years, he has been advising the IQP teams of the project center in Hangzhou, China.

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Robert Lombardi
Robert Lombardi
Adjunct Teaching Professor, The Business School

I have been practicing law for 37 years with a concentration in corporate, business and healthcare law.  I have been at Mirick, O’Connell, DeMallie Lougee, LLP since 1980.  I am currently Of Counsel in the Corporate and Business Department.

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Rob Sarnie
Rob Sarnie
Professor of Practice, The Business School

Rob joins WPI from Fidelity Investments, where he spent 23 years in the finance industry, holding multiple executive leadership positions including VP of Strategy and Planning, VP Human Resource Systems, and VP Finance, Procurement, and Accounting Systems. Rob also previously held positions in both the public and private sectors for companies in the manufacturing and nonprofit industries.

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Kenny Ching
Kenny Ching
Assistant Professor, The Business School

I am a researcher on organization behavior, people analytics and entrepreneurship related topics, with particular focus on applying advanced econometrics and big data based research designs. I have particular expertise in the digital economy, including Internet video, sports analytics, Web-3 and electronic gaming.

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Edward Gonsalves
Edward Gonsalves

Professor Gonsalves is currently a full time instructor in the Business School. He is a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master’s Degree in Management Science.

Professor Gonsalves’ career has spanned thirty five years in the technology field, having held positions in design, applications, sales, marketing, business development and management. He is the holder of 9 patents and has presented at a variety of industry conferences in the area of RFID.

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Adrienne Hall-Phillips
Adrienne Hall-Phillips
Associate Professor, The Business School

Being an educator is more than just distributing facts and figures; it's demonstrating the importance of this knowledge in a way that can be relevant for every learner. It's not truly knowledge until the student can grasp and apply it. I consider myself to be an advocate for knowledge - encouraging learning and providing the tools needed to be successful and independent thinkers. I take any opportunity possible to introduce new technologies and social networking behaviors that I feel are relevant into my daily classroom activities.

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Purvi Shah
Purvi Shah
Associate Professor, The Business School

Professor Shah has 'done' marketing and now she 'teaches' marketing at the WPI Business School. She has a diverse industry experience in the marketing/brand management function of mid-size to large corporations across consumer goods, retail, and real estate verticals. In academics, she aspires to play her role as a researcher (knowledge creation) and teacher (knowledge dissemination). Her research questions, in the context of discovery, attempt to explain and understand interesting and challenging marketing phenomena that have not received much research attention.

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Michael Elmes
Michael Elmes

Since arriving at WPI in 1990, I have had the great pleasure of teaching a variety of organization studies undergraduate and graduate courses, engaging in organization studies research and theory development, and offering service to the university, the Business School, and my field. With respect to teaching, I have framed my role in the classroom as helping technically-minded students become more cognizant and mindful of themselves and of the human and behavioral dimensions of organization life.

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William Krein
William Krein
Adjunct Instructor/Lecturer, The Business School

As an adjunct faculty member at WPI for 15 years and a WPI graduate, I am proud to share the experience of a successful multi-disciplined career with current WPI students. The foundation and preparation for my engineering, financial, general management, and consulting career and the confidence and resourcefulness to succeed as an entrepreneur resulted largely from my education at WPI.

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John Lindholm
John Lindholm
Assistant Teaching Professor, The Business School

Jed’s organizational behavior experience is shaped through 15+ years as a human resource leader.  His experience includes work as a Change Agent, Director/Manager, and Internal and External Consultant.  His consulting services focus on performance management, total rewards, HR analytics, and workplace learning, and his research and teaching experience includes the areas of organizational performance improvement, competency identification, and rewards management.

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Elizabeth Lingo
Elizabeth Lingo
Associate Professor, The Business School

How do leaders work across disciplines, organizations, cultures, and networks to co-create and implement novel solutions, sustainable human-centered change, and entrepreneurial ventures?  Over the past twenty years, this question has motivated Elizabeth Long Lingo's research, innovative project-based teaching, and efforts to advance organizational transformation and policy change to forge more equitable and creatively vibrant organizations, cities, and fields of enterprise. 

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Steve Taylor
Steve Taylor

My research is focused in two areas: Organizational aesthetics takes seriously the idea that management is as much an art as it is a science, and applies art-based scholarship and practice to management and organizations. Reflective practice is the ability to analyze our own actions and learn from that how to be more effective, ethical, and artful as managers and leaders. At the heart of my work as a researcher and teacher, is my own practice as a playwright. My plays have been performed in England, France, Poland, Canada, New Zealand, Italy, and the USA.

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Soussan Djamasbi
Soussan Djamasbi

I specialize in user experience and decision-making research, focusing on uncovering the intricacies of human cognition to understand the factors that enhance or impede the effective use of information technologies.

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Nima Kordzadeh
Nima Kordzadeh
Assistant Professor, The Business School

Dr. Kordzadeh joined the faculty of the Business School at WPI in July 2017. He received his Ph.D. in Business Administration with an emphasis on Information Technology from the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research interests include health informatics, social media, information privacy, and business intelligence and analytics.

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Diane Strong
Diane Strong
Professor & Department Head, The Business School

WPI provides an environment that values both teaching and research, which is ideal for me. I enjoy teaching at WPI because students are interested in learning and willing to work hard. My teaching focuses on how business, healthcare, and nonprofit organizations can best use computing technologies, such as database systems, electronic health records systems, and mobile apps. Students in my classes learn to design computing applications that meet the needs of organizations.

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Bengisu Tulu
Bengisu Tulu

I enjoy teaching because it allows me to interact with students who have the potential to make the world a better place using technology. I continually innovate in my courses to ensure students enjoy the learning experience, learn the key concepts and skills related to information systems through real world examples, have an opportunity to learn from each other, learn to present themselves as professionals, and most importantly learn to use or develop technology to make a difference.

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Vance Wilson
Vance Wilson
Associate Teaching Professor, The Business School

Prior to arriving at WPI in 2010, I held tenure-track positions with the University of Wisconsin system. I have visited at Cal Poly-SLO, University of Toledo, and Arizona State University. My teaching centers on software development, large business systems, and innovative uses of IT. My overarching research addresses organizational aspects of human-computer interaction with special emphasis on e-health, computer-mediated communication, and technology support for software development teams.

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Richard Gram
Richard Gram
Adjunct Teaching Professor,
Graduate Studies Online

Richard Gram has taught courses at WPI since 2007.  Originally hired by the Management Department, he spent several years teaching for Corporate and Professional Education at customer locations around New England.  Currently he teaches classes for the Business School and Civil Engineering.  He has taught Project Management (MIS 576 and CE 580), Project Evaluation (CE 3025), Innovating with IT (MIS 500), IT Policy and Strategy (MIS 581), and Business Intelligence (MIS 584).

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Sharon Johnson
Sharon Johnson

I enjoy teaching at WPI because students bring a lot of energy and enthusiasm to their learning; I am also inspired by their optimism. My teaching also reflects topics that motivate me:  detailed process design in our Industrial Engineering program, exploring the implications of operational excellence in our graduate programs, and advancing health care systems. 

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Renata Konrad
Renata Konrad
Associate Professor, The Business School

The application of Industrial Engineering and mathematical knowledge has always been a rewarding challenge for me. I draw on a variety of Industrial Engineering techniques including optimization and simulation. My research has included evaluating anti-human trafficking efforts, computationally characterizing episodes of care from health insurance claim records, and examining the impact of physician incentives on patient outcomes, as well as research related to mental health, patient flow and practice guidelines.  

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Sara Saberi
Sara Saberi
Assistant Professor, The Business School

My research agenda takes advantage of my educational background. The first area of research is supply chain networks equilibrium. In this research stream, I model supply chain networks to understand the interactions of agents who act in their own self-interest and their impact to business and society. A broad class of research question in this area is motivated by the interaction between supply chain networks and sustainable and responsible decision-making. The focus in my second area of research is on Blockchain technology contributions in the supply chain networks.

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Joseph Sarkis
Joseph Sarkis

Joseph Sarkis is a Professor of Management within Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Business School. He previously served as a faculty member at Clark University and the University of Texas at Arlington. His teaching and research interests are in the fields of environmental sustainability, operations and supply chain management. He is the author or co-author of over 600 publications. His research is widely cited and earned the designation of highly cited researcher for eight years from 2016-2023 from Thomson-Reuters/Clarivate Analytics (Web-of-Science).

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Walter Towner
Walter Towner
Associate Teaching Professor-Business, The Business School

I am interested in manufacturing and industrial engineering. My main interests lie at the intersection of manufacturing processes and the financial aspect of the business that relates to these processes. I see my mission as enabling students to become leaders in a business environment and helping them extract value from the processes that drive the organization. We do this by using tools like axiomatic design and Lean Six Sigma methods.

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Andrew Trapp
Andrew Trapp
Associate Professor, The Business School

I am Associate Professor of Operations and Industrial Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), with courtesy professorships in Mathematical Sciences and Data Science. I hold a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. My objective is to use science and technology to assist real human need by improving systems that serve vulnerable peoples, such as refugees and asylum seekers, survivors of human trafficking, and children in the foster care system.



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Joe Zhu
Joe Zhu

Joe Zhu is Professor of Operations Analytics in the Business School, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is an internationally recognized expert in methods of performance evaluation and benchmarking using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), and his research interests are in the areas of operations and business analytics, productivity modeling, and performance evaluation and benchmarking. He has published and co-edited several books focusing on performance evaluation and benchmarking using DEA and developed the DEAFrontier software.

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Paul Delvy
Paul Delvy
Adjunct Instructor/Lecturer, The Business School

I enjoy teaching an interrelated series of topics that combine current industrial methodologies with the basics from academic study that form the foundations for commercial practice. The WPI classes give me an opportunity to share, mentor and steward students through simulated and practical problems, guiding them to plausible and realistic solutions.

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Jim Ryan
Jim Ryan
Associate Teaching Professor, The Business School

Prior to accepting my faculty position with WPI in 2019, I held tenured positions with Troy University and Auburn University at Montgomery, retiring from the Alabama System in 2019. During this time frame, I also visited the University of Louisiana at LaFayette. My teaching philosophy focuses on practical application of Information Technology and I have taught courses across the spectrum of management information systems, concentrating on systems analysis, database management systems, e-commerce, computer networking, and information systems strategy.

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