Faculty Mentors

MBA, University of Southern California; BA, UCLA

Scott Abrams is an Assistant 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.

Dr. Guo’s research focuses on organizational and intercultural communication in business. She is particularly interested and specialized in identity development and strategic negotiation in various international organizational contexts. Her research has appeared on top-tier journals that examined topics such as organizational culture, conflict management, emotion management, communication technology use in business (e.g., social media, mobile), and leadership communication. Professor’s pedagogical expertise in academia includes organizational communication, communication strategies in business, leadership communication, business and professional communication, communication in non-western culture, and persuasion. Prior to academia, Dr. Guo held program and event coordinator positions in Chinese and U.S. multinational companies, specializing intercultural business communication.

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.

Inga Maslova is an applied statistician specializing in time series analysis, machine learning, wavelet techniques, functional data analysis, big data, and applications to finance, business analytics, economics, hydrology, remote sensing, precision agriculture, and climate change problems. She has taught and developed courses in statistical learning, business statistics, data analytics and visualization. To her classroom she brings her own experience from consulting for Cisco, working with the World Bank on business cycle synchronization; analyzing drone data to help farmers make better crop management decisions at Utah Water Research Lab; using statistical learning models to forecast commodity prices. In 2018 she received a Golden Apple Teaching Award for teaching excellence. Before joining USC, Inga was a faculty at American University, Washington DC. She received her BS (Summa Cum Laude) in Mathematical Statistics from Vilnius University, Lithuania; MS and PhD in Statistics from Utah State 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, Boston University; M.S., Universidad Carlos III, Madrid; BA, Politecnico di Milano

Davide Proserpio is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. In his research, Professor Proserpio seeks to measure and quantify the impact of digital data and platforms on industries and markets, and most of his work focuses on the empirical analysis of a variety of companies including Airbnb,TripAdvisor, and Expedia. Professor Proserpio holds a B.S. from Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy), a M.S. from Carlos III University (Madrid, Spain), and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Boston University.

PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Joe Raffiee is an Assistant Professor of Strategy in the Management and Organization Department within the Marshall School of Business at USC. He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2016. Joe's research is focused on understanding the causes and consequences of employee mobility and entrepreneurship. Joe's research has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and the Academy of Management Perspectives. His research has also been covered and cited by media outlets such as the Harvard Business Review, Huffington Post, Inc. Magazine, and Wired.

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.

MBA, BS, University of Southern California

Zivia Sweeney is an expert in strategic planning and budgeting, mergers and acquisitions, and accounting and finance operations for manufacturing, healthcare, service, and nonprofit organizations. She has served in senior management roles in public corporate and nonprofit arenas, and has held the of Chief Financial Officer, Vice President of Finance, and Corporate Controller. Professor Sweeney is a PriceWaterhouseCoopers alumnus. She has served for a number of years as a member of the USC Leventhal School’s Accounting Advisory Board.