Faculty

The noncredit Supply Chain Management Certificate is taught by exemplary faculty from the UVA Darden School of Business. These faculty members have won awards, studied and worked extensively in their fields, and their work is well-published. The collective business management expertise of Yael Grushka-Cockayne and Ronald T. Wilcox includes a focus on quantitative analysis and marketing financial services. Within the supply chain management field, Doug Thomas brings a wealth of real-world and academic experience.

Yael Grushka-Cockayne

Professor of Business Administration
Altec Styslinger Foundation Bicentennial Chair in Business Administration
Senior Associate Dean for Professional Degree Programs
Academic area: quantitative analysis
Areas of expertise: forecasting, multi-criteria decision analysis, behavioral decision making, project management, innovation and new product development
Education: B.S., Ben-Gurion University; M.S., London School of Economics; Ph.D., M.Res., London Business School

Professor Yael Grushka-Cockayne’s research and teaching activities focus on data science, forecasting, project management and behavioral decision-making. Her research is published in numerous academic and professional journals, and she is a regular speaker at international conferences in the areas of decision analysis, project management and management science. Grushka-Cockayne is also an award-winning teacher, winning the Darden Morton Leadership Faculty Award in 2011, the University of Virginia’s Mead-Colley Award in 2012 and the Darden Outstanding Faculty Award and Faculty Diversity Award in 2013. In 2015, she won the University of Virginia All University Teaching Award. Grushka-Cockayne teaches the core “Decision Analysis” course, an elective she designed on project management, as well as an elective on data science. She is the leader of the open enrollment courses “Project Management for Executives” and “The Women’s Leadership Program.”

Before starting her academic career, she worked in San Francisco as a marketing director of an Israeli ERP company. As an expert in project management, she has served as a consultant to international firms in the aerospace and pharma industries. Grushka-Cockayne is a UVA Excellence in Diversity fellow and a member of INFORMS, the Decision Analysis Society, the Operational Research Society and the Project Management Institute (PMI). She is an associate editor at Management Science and Operation research and the secretary/treasurer of the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society.

In 2014, Grushka-Cockayne was named one of 21 thought-leader professors in data science. Her recent “Fundamentals of Project Planning and Management” Coursera MOOC had over 100,000 enrolled across 200 countries worldwide.

Ronald T. Wilcox

NewMarket Corporation Professor of Business Administration
Associate Dean of Executive Degree Programs
Academic area: marketing
Areas of expertise: marketing financial services, branding, marketing for nonprofits, public policy and marketing

Education: A.B., Xavier University; M.S., Ph.D., Washington University

Professor Ronald T. Wilcox, NewMarket Corporation Professor of Business Administration, teaches the required marketing course in the MBA and Executive MBA programs as well as the elective “Pricing.” He also teaches in numerous Executive Education programs.

His research, focused on the marketing of financial services and its interface with public policy, has appeared in leading marketing and finance journals, such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Marketing Science and the Journal of Business. His research and writing have also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes and The Weekly Standard. He is a frequent contributor to Forbes. He is the author of the book Whatever Happened to Thrift?: Why Americans Don’t Save and What to Do about It, published by Yale University Press.

Wilcox joined the Darden faculty in 2001. He was formerly an assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon Graduate School of Industrial Administration and an economist for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Doug Thomas

Henry E. McWane Professor of Business Administration
Academic area: Supply chain management
Areas of expertise: Supply chain management, quantitative modeling, coordinating production and inventory planning
Education: B.S., Cornell University; M.S., Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology

Professor Doug Thomas is the Henry E. McWane Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business. Prior to joining Darden, he was a professor of supply chain management in the Smeal College of Business at Penn State, where he was the faculty director of the MBA program from 2011 to 2014. He is a co-founder and chief scientist for Plan2Execute, a firm that provides supply chain software and consulting solutions in warehouse management, transportation management and advanced production and inventory planning. Thomas received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia Institute of Technology in industrial engineering and holds a B.S. in operations research from Cornell University. Prior to returning to graduate school, he worked for C-Way Systems, a software company specializing in manufacturing scheduling. In addition to his years on the faculty at Penn State, Thomas has had the pleasure of serving as a visiting faculty member at INSEAD (in Fontainebleau, France), the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University and the Darden School at the University of Virginia.

Thomas currently teaches courses in the areas of supply chain management and quantitative modeling in Darden’s MBA, Executive MBA and Ph.D. programs. A frequent faculty leader in executive development programs, he has led numerous executive education sessions in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, including programs at Penn State, INSEAD and Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as custom programs for Accenture, DuPont, ExxonMobil, IBM, Ingersoll-Rand, Mars, Office Depot, Parker-Hannifin, Pfizer, Schlumberger and the U.S. Marine Corps. He has testified as an expert witness and consulted for several large organizations on supply chain strategy including Accenture, CSL Behring, Dell, ExxonMobil and Lockheed Martin Aerospace Corporation. He is a co-author of Inventory and Production Management in Supply Chains, CRC Press.

His research interests include coordinating production and inventory planning across the extended enterprise and connecting decision models to logistics performance measurement. His work has appeared in several academic and practitioner journals in the areas of logistics and operations management, including Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management and Production and Operations Management. He serves as a senior editor for Production and Operations Management. He is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences, as well as the Production and Operations Management Society.