Phillip Leslie, Faculty Director
Professor

Phillip is a leading expert on ticket pricing, having published a number of empirical papers that explore venue tiering, season ticket bundling and ticket reselling. A theme throughout this work is how simple pricing strategies can perform very well compared to more sophisticated (and often impractical) alternatives.

Phillip has also written a series of papers on information disclosure as a policy tool. For example, in one study he shows that restaurant hygiene grade cards caused a 20% decrease in the number of people admitted to hospital with food-related illnesses. Another study shows that consumers at Starbucks reduced calorie purchases by 6% due to calorie posting on the menus.

In other research, Phillip has written about managerial incentives in private equity, consumer boycotts and the returns to education. His research is published in the American Economic Journal, American Economic Review, Journal of Labor Economics, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, Quarterly Journal of Economics and the RAND Journal of Economics. Phillip is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Phillip teaches strategic management at Anderson and he is an experienced executive education teacher. He has also participated in business study trips to Australia, China, India, Japan and Russia. Phillip is originally from Australia. He received his Ph. D in Economics from Yale University.

Rajit Gadh
Professor at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at UCLA

Dr Rajit Gadh is Founder and Director of the Wireless Internet for Mobile Enterprise Consortium or WINMEC(http://winmec.ucla.edu) of which major organizations including ETRI, Hewlett Packard, Hughes Network Systems, Intel, ISBM-Italy, ITC Infotech, Lucent Technologies, Microsoft, Motorola, Qualcomm, Raytheon, Sprint, Siemens, TCS, Verizon Wireless and others have been sponsors/members.

Dr. Gadh is also Founder and Director of the Wireless Media Lab in UCLA. Dr. Gadh works in the areas of Mobile/Wireless Internet, Wireless Multimedia (http://winmec.ucla.edu/mobime), RFID edge-of-the-network technology, RFID Middleware (WinRFID), RFID-sensor interfaces (ReWINS), wireless cyber security, Smart Grid Technologies (http://wireless.ucla.edu/wml). Wireless in Healthcare and Pharmahttp://winmec.ucla.edu/pharma, and Tracking technologies in manufacturing and retail. He has over 150 papers in journals, conferences and technical magazines, and, 3 patents granted

He has a Doctorate degree from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), a Masters from Cornell University and a Bachelors degree from IIT Kanpur. He has taught as a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley, has been a Assistant, Associate and Full Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and did his sabbatical as a visiting researcher at Stanford University for a year. He has won several awards from NSF (CAREER award, Research Initiation Award, NSF-Lucent Industry Ecology Award, GOAL-I award), SAE (Ralph Teetor award), IEEE (second best student-paper, WTS), ASME (Kodak Best Technical Paper award), AT&T (Industrial ecology fellow award), Engineering Education Foundation (Research Initiation Award), William Wong Fellowship award from University of Hong-Kong, etc., and other accolades in his career. He is on the Editorial board of ACM Computers in Entertainment Publication and the CAD Journal.

Mary Ann Piette
Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory

Mary Ann Piette is the Deputy of the Building Technologies Department and has been at LBNL since 1983. The DRRC recently developed the Open Automated Demand Response Communications Specification which is a key element of the NIST Smart Grid standards and is being deployed to deliver of 150 MW of DR in California and throughout the US. Ms. Piette has extensive experience developing and evaluating low-energy and demand response technologies for buildings. She specialized in commissioning, energy information systems, benchmarking, and diagnostics. She has authored over 100 papers on efficiency and demand response. In 2006 Ms. Piette received the Benner Award at the National Conference on Building Commissioning for contributions to making commissioning "business as usual". Ms. Piette completed her undergraduate work at UC Berkeley in Physical Science. She has a Master's of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley and a Licentiate in Building Services Engineering from the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.

Eric Sussman
Lecturer, UCLA Anderson School of Management

He teaches in the areas of cost/managerial accounting, financial accounting (beginning through advanced), financial statement analysis, corporate financial reporting, and real estate investment and finance to undergraduate, graduate, and Executive Education students. He is the creator of Insight FSA, an analytical software tool which automatically and critically measures, evaluates, and reports upon the financial accounting and corporate reporting risk for all public companies via Edgar On-line.

Outside of campus, Mr. Sussman is president of Amber Capital, Inc., Manager of Fountain Management, LLC, and Managing Partner of Sequoia Real Estate Partners and the Pacific Value Opportunities Fund, which collectively employ approximately 30 individuals, and which have acquired, rehabilitated, developed, and managed over two million square feet of residential and commercial real estate in the past 18 years. The firms' portfolio presently consists of industrial, multi-family residential, and retail properties (approximately 1,200 residential units and some 700,000 square feet of commercial space).

He is on the Board of Directors and Chairman of the Audit Committee of Causeway Capital's group of funds (International Value, Emerging Markets, Global Value, and Global Absolute Return Funds, which collectively have in excess of $1.5 billion in assets), and Pacific Charter School Development, Inc.; and was former Chairman of the Presidio Fund and former Audit Committee Chair of Atlantic Inertial Systems, Inc., a producer and manufacturer of electromagnetic sensors. He received his MBA from Stanford, with honors, in 1993, after graduating Summa cum Laude from UCLA in 1987. He is a licensed CPA in the State of California.

Terry Taylor
UC Berkeley

Terry Taylor is the Milton W. Terrill Associate Professor in the Operations and Information Technology Management Group at the Haas School of Business. He is the Faculty Co-Director of Berkeley’s Center for Executive Education.

Prior to his position at Berkeley, Terry was a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business and Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. Prior to his academic career, Terry was a consultant for McKinsey & Company. He received his Ph.D. and B.S. from Stanford University.

Terry’s research interests include contracting and coordination in distribution channels, the marketing/manufacturing interface, and operations management. His work has explored the role of on-going relationships in supply chains, contract renegotiation, outsourcing, forecasting, and product line design. He has consulted on marketing and/or operational issues in the retail, high-tech, banking, and telecommunications industries. He is an associate editor for Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Operations Research, and Production and Operations Management. While at Columbia University, he received the Columbia Business School Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. He received Berkeley’s Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2009 and 2011. Businessweekidentified him as a Top Ten Business Professor in 2011.