Vanderbilt Executive MBA Faculty

Michael Burcham has over 20 years of extensive experience in health care innovation, entrepreneurship, and startup venture coaching. He is a highly successful three-time entrepreneur–most recently President of ParadigmHealth, a $300-million disease management firm. In addition to his post at Vanderbilt, Michael serves as President of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center.

Bill Christie’s studies of the major financial markets in the mid-1990s concluded that Nasdaq market makers were implicitly colluding to maintain artificially high trading profits at the expense of investors. His research resulted in sweeping reform of the Nasdaq, introduction of the SEC Order Handling Rules, and a $1.027 billion settlement against the defendants. Bill won first prize for outstanding papers published in the Journal of Finance based on this research. He is a five-time recipient of the EMBA Teaching award and was ranked either first or second among star faculty in each Business Week ranking from 1992 through 2000.

Nancy Hyer is an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management. Nancy earned her MBA and Ph.D. from Indiana University and holds a BS from the University of Richmond. At Owen, Nancy teaches executive and MBA classes focused on project management and process improvement. Nancy has also taught at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has won executive program, Executive MBA, and MBA teaching awards, and both school and university-wide awards for excellence in undergraduate education. She won the 2009 best paper award from the Journal of Operations Management for a study co-authored with a faculty member from Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Michael Bowling joined the Executive MBA faculty in 2009. Currently, he holds the position of CMO for Business Solutions at AT&T where he has also served as President of AT&T Mexico as well as a variety of other management positions in more than 20 years with the company. He earned his MBA from the Executive program at Vanderbilt in 1997.

As a member of the Leadership and Organization Development team, I am helping to build PDRI's capability in this growing practice area. We leverage the long history and experience of PDRI's rigorous competency and assessment practice to address issues related to leadership and organizational effectiveness, including determining critical leader competencies, assessing and developing leader capabilities, and assessing the broader health of the organization in which leaders operate, with a special focus on the strategic effectiveness of HR practices.

Neta Moye's research interests focus on employee motivation, particularly as it relates to innovation and creativity at work. Her current research projects focus on how aspects of social context and interpersonal interactions at work influence motivation to generate ideas. Professor Moye has been honored with the Paine Award for Academic Excellence from the Robert H. Smith School of Business for her research accomplishments as a doctoral student and the Krowe Award for Teaching Excellence for her teaching accomplishments as a doctoral student.

Professor Smiley was appointed Faculty Director of Owen's new Americas MBA program in 2012. As former Prinicipal at Deloitte Consulting, Jeff has vast business experience in several countries which will be invaluable in our new program.

Rita Sowell teaches a mathematics preparation class that includes college algebra, linear systems and differential calculus to incoming MBA Students with limited mathematical experience.