Faculty Mentors

MBA, University of Southern California; BA, UCLA

Scott Abrams is an Associate Professor of Clinical Finance and Business Economics. He specializes in corporate finance, financial analysis and valuation, and portfolio management. Professor Abrams teaches these subjects in the MBA, MS Finance, and Undergraduate programs. He is a two-time winner of the Golden Apple Teaching Award for the Full-Time MBA Core Program (2016 and 2021). Prior to joining the faculty at USC Marshall, he worked in the corporate finance groups at Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. and is an alumnus of Deloitte. He is a CFA Charterholder and is a licensed CPA.

MBA, University of Southern California; BA, Loyola Marymount University

Maria Colman is the owner and founder of handmadeMaria®. The original business plan was part of her MBA at the University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business. Maria has over 30 years' experience in retail marketing, accounting management, direct sales, and education. Her upcycled products and art pieces are sold at brick and mortar and online stores.

Courses taught include; BUAD 302, BUAD 302T, WRIT 340, GSBA 542, and GSBA 523T—core courses for undergraduate and graduate students.

Her commitment to her students surpasses teaching—she also coaches undergraduate student teams for case competitions as an advisor for the Marshall Case Team and accompanies them to competitions.

PhD, University of Southern California; BA, University of California, Santa Cruz<br>

Dr. Glenn Fox is a faculty member at the University of Southern California's Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, in the Marshall School of Business. His current projects focus on neural systems for emotion regulation, high stakes training, and developing entrepreneurial mindset skills in founders and business leaders.

Glenn received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from USC, where he focused on the neural correlates of gratitude, empathy, and neuroplasticity. Currently, Glenn is the Director and Founder of the USC Found Well Initiative which aims to understand and promote entrepreneurial mindset in founders and business leaders.

B.A., Pomona College; M.A., University of California, Irvine; J.D., Stanford Law School

MST, Golden Gate University; BS, University of California at Berkeley

Greg was a partner at Kling & Pathak LLP prior to its acquisition by a Big 4 accounting firm. During his career in public accounting, Greg provided tax planning, tax compliance, and business consulting services to clients. Greg is a full-time lecturer who specializes in individual, corporate, and real estate taxation issues. He is also the update author for the LexisNexis treatise, Federal Taxes Affecting Real Estate. Greg earned his B.S. in business administration (accounting) from University of California, Berkeley and his M.S. in taxation from Golden Gate University.

Milan Miric joined the IS Group within the DSO Department in 2016. His research tries to understand basic questions about how firms can capture and create value in digital industries. In particular, his research tries to understand how the unique structural features of digital industries (network effects, low costs of innovating, non-monetary motivations) influence the process by which firms capture and create value. His work is largely empirical combining large-scale panel datasets with interviews and field work. His research work draws heavily on insights from psychology, economics, and sociology but tries to contribute to the literature on information systems and innovation.

PhD, Yale University; MBA, University of California, Los Angeles; BA, Stanford University

Dennis Schorr is an expert on strategic flexibility, marketing resources and capabilities, and competitive advantage. His research has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He has consulted for a variety of organizations in Marketing Strategy, Marketing Research and Strategy, and Total Quality Management and Market Responsiveness.

PhD, Ivey Business School, UWO; MIR, University of Toronto; BA, University of Western Ontario

Amy Sommer completed a post doctoral fellowship at Harvard and her research and teaching focuses on leadership and teams. She specializes in how organizational crisis and temporal dynamics influence teams and leaders to enhance healthcare management, creativity, and cross-cultural management. To study these topics, she is developing new research methods, including crowdsourcing science for large-scale data collection and data analytics. Her research appears in a number of scholarly journals, including Nature Scientific Data, The Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, and Group and Organization Management. She has received honors and awards, including funding from three federal governments and a number of universities. She has worked with students across programs at undergraduate, masters, MBA, executive, and PhD levels, at Columbia University, West Point Military Academy, and HEC Paris School of Management in France. Examples of her course creation include Leading High Performance Teams and Mixed Methods in Health Systems Research.

EdD Organizational Change and Leadership and MBA, University of Southern California; BA, Smith College

Jody Tolan specializes in leadership and organizational development. She has created programs to build leadership skills among emerging managers, middle managers, and senior executive teams to meet strategic and organizational goals. She has also led workshops on leading teams, management communications and strategy development. She has designed and facilitated programs in Marshall’s Office of Executive Education and consulted with Wescom Credit Union, Honda Financial Services, Allergan, BDO Seidman and Thailand Government Savings Bank. Professor Tolan began her career on Capitol Hill followed by positions in several boutique consulting firms in New York City.