About

As one of my students once said, the only people who do not use accounting are people who are no longer alive. Yet, few people understand accounting well enough to use it to make informed decisions.

Dr. Hansong Pu has decades of managerial and entrepreneurial experiences with international corporations and small businesses. He spent his past eight years teaching at Hangzhou Dianzi University in China and WPI. Meanwhile, he worked with colleagues at both universities to start collaboration programs that serve the students and faculties on both sides, including the WPI China IQP Center.

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.

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, and electronic gaming I also teach classes on general business strategy, technology management and entrepreneurship.

Professor Gonsalves is currently a full time instructor in the Foisie 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.

Purvi has 'done' marketing and now she 'teaches' marketing at the WPI Foisie 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.

Brent manages the $8M FBS budget and operations for 40+ people assigned to the School.  He’s a WPI grad (MBA, 2006) and teaches organizational behavior and leadership. Brent retired from the Air Force as a Colonel after 27 years of active and reserve service. Highlights include three tours in/around Afghanistan, command of a 450-person security squadron, and staff tours at AFSOC, USAF HQ, and with SECDEF. Formerly an Associate Professor at the Naval War College, Brent also spent 16 years working in a Fortune 500 information technology firm.

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.

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.

Dr. Kordzadeh joined the faculty of the Foisie 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.

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.

I enjoy teaching at WPI because students bring a lot of energy and enthusiasm to their learning, and I am often inspired by their optimism. My teaching also reflects topics that motivate me:  detailed process design in our Industrial Engineering program, improving healthcare delivery as part of the Health Systems Innovation certificate, and exploring the implications of operational excellence in our MBA program.

Since my first day of teaching, I believed that I loved being in the classroom. I enjoy my role as an instructor because it enables me to see directly the outcome of my effort. I like the fact that as someone in higher education, I have the opportunity to make a positive influence on a young person's life. I make every effort to not only deliver the material of the course, but to develop a mentoring relationship with each student to help them grow as individuals and strive for success.

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.

Joe Zhu is Professor of Operations Analytics in the Foisie 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.

What I do: I teach approximately 10 different courses across the schools of business, electrical engineering and computer science. I also do a certain amount of research and publish the occasional paper.