Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Casey Borman

Gayle Northrop

Gayle Northrop (’96) is a consultant, coach and educator, and is president of Northrop Nonprofit Consulting, a firm specializing in strategic planning, organizational development and leadership development for nonprofits, social enterprises and non-governmental organizations worldwide. With broad international experience, particularly in African countries, she has dedicated her career to helping organizations drive positive social change through strengthened systems, improved service delivery and more effective measurement and communication of impact.

Northrop chose to pursue her MBA at UCLA Anderson because of its partnership with Johnson & Johnson and a shared commitment to apply solid management practices and business skills to mission-driven organizations. Over the last 20 years, she has helped design, teach in, evaluate and expand a suite of UCLA/Johnson & Johnson management development programs, which include the Head Start Management Fellows Program, Health Care Executive Program and Management Development Institute for African Health Care Leaders.

Northrop is now senior faculty advisor for Impact@Anderson and teaches social entrepreneurship, governance, impact measurement and strategy for social impact organizations. She leads a UCLA Anderson global immersion course on social entrepreneurship and innovation, most recently in South Africa. "The course attracts business-savvy students who in most cases know little or nothing about the concept of social entrepreneurship," she says. "MBA candidates visit foreign countries to see, in part, what it's like to do business there. So when you have the opportunity to introduce them to a variety of businesses that are all doing social good, it changes the way students think about the value of their MBA to society. It's exciting to see how global immersion courses can dramatically shift mindsets."

Students returned from the experience in South Africa with the sense that no matter what sector or industry they entered, their work could result in some form of positive social impact. Northrop carries these transferable learnings into the general UCLA Anderson curriculum. "I teach students that there is an ever-growing list of business practices that prioritize people and planet, that can cost less and generate revenue," says Northrop. "I teach them that entrepreneurs, and not just social entrepreneurs, must adopt a socially responsible business model early on — they need to bake it into the DNA of a company."

Prior to starting her consulting business, Northrop was a strategy and organizational effectiveness consultant with the Warner Group (now part of Gartner Group). She then joined ViewSonic Corporation, a billion-dollar technology company, where she was responsible for global strategic planning, corporate development, executive recruiting and human resources/organizational development.

In addition to serving on the faculty of the UCLA Anderson School of Management, Northrop is adjunct faculty at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business. She is currently working with the University of Cape Town's Bertha Centre for Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship on an initiative to identify and scale social innovations in health in the global south. She is the co-founder and former associate director of Spark Health, a program assisting governments in Africa to strengthen their health systems and improve health outcomes, including the elimination of mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

Shawn S. Patt ('07)

Shawn S. Patt is a Lecturer at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He teaches Management 168 (Personal Financial Health: Theory and Practice) and serves as a faculty advisor for Student Investment Fund, helping elite students manage a portion of the UCLA foundation.

Patt is the founder of Atala Financial, an independent wealth management and business advisory firm. He has also been teaching personal finance since finishing Anderson in 2007.

Prior to Atala, Patt spent nearly 20 years as a private wealth advisor at RBC Wealth Management, Morgan Stanley & UBS Financial Services. He teaches his students to leverage core finance principles to design the financial life of their dreams.

David Ravetch

David Ravetch teaches Principles of Accounting, Intermediate Accounting, Cost Accounting, Special Topics in Accounting, and Applications in Excel and Mathematics for Management. He is also involved with all three MBA Programs at UCLA. He has taught intensive Mathematics, Statistics, Excel and Accounting workshops geared towards preparing incoming MBA students for the rigorous quantitative challenges of these programs. David Ravetch has won numerous teaching awards. He has been named Favorite Accounting Instructor, as voted by the accounting students, as well as, Most Recommended Instructor, as voted by students campus wide. In the spring of 1995, the California Society of Certified Public Accountants, Committee on Accounting Education awarded Mr. Ravetch their Faculty Merit Award, which recognizes excellence in teaching.

When David first began teaching at UCLA, the current Undergraduate Accounting program was in its infancy stages and UCLA was not yet a major contender for recruitment efforts by the International Accounting Firms. In the fall of 1995, under the guidance and direction of David, the Accounting Minor was the first approved minor at UCLA. David was named as the Director of the Undergraduate Accounting Program by the Anderson School. He served as the Director of the Undergraduate Accounting Program for seven years. David was also the faculty advisor for the Student Accounting Society from 1985 to 2002. Today, the UCLA Accounting Minor is recognized as one of the strongest Undergraduate Accounting Programs and UCLA graduates are heavily recruited by the International Accounting Firms. David has always been focused on the success of his students, both academically and professionally. David is currently implementing a new method of teaching Intermediate Accounting, utilizing a cutting-edge case-study format. This format has assisted students in better understanding financial statements, as well as in developing research, presentation, and evaluation skills that enable them to be more effective in their professional careers.

In addition to his love of teaching, David has a passion for music. He plays the piano, guitar, and clarinet. He has written many musicals: musicals for children and musicals about the public accounting profession, which has been performed at the annual UCLA Accounting Awards banquets. His passion for the classics has led him to create a series of 1 hour lectures showing how well-known classical themes are used in film, television, pop music and Broadway.

Nathan Wilson

Nathan Wilson (’11) has 15 years of experience in biomedical and microsystems research. He has co-authored more than 30 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications, and has presented at international conferences on medical imaging, bioengineering and computer modeling of micro-electro-mechanical systems. He has served multiple times as an invited panelist at FDA guidance meetings.

Wilson is actively engaged in university research on computational modeling of blood flow. His most recent research publication appeared in the December 2013 issue of the Journal of Medical Devices. He is also a co-investigator on a joint UCSD-Berkeley grant recently funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). For the NSF project, Wilson leads the continued software development for SimVascular, the open-source code package he co-developed as a graduate student. SimVascular is used for cardiovascular disease research, medical device design and surgical planning by several leading university research laboratories worldwide.

Wilson joined the UCLA Anderson faculty in 2012. He teaches introductory classes in entrepreneurship, business plan development and technology and science commercialization. Wilson is actively involved in developing the curriculum and efforts to promote undergraduate entrepreneurial education at UCLA. He became the director of the Price Center's Undergraduate Minor in Entrepreneurship program in 2019. 

Wilson's entrepreneurial efforts include founding two companies. He founded Cardiovascular Simulation Inc. (CSI) in 2007 with former Stanford professors Charles A. Taylor (bioengineering) and Christopher K. Zarins (vascular surgery). The startup licensed technology developed at Stanford and continued internal development of SimVascular. During Wilson's tenure as president, the company secured over $200,000 in seed investment and was awarded a $100,000 Phase I SBIR contract from the National Institutes of Health. After his departure during the financial crisis, CSI (now Heartflow Inc.) survived and secured over $100 million in investment.

Wilson more recently founded Open Source Medical Software Corporation (OSMSC) in 2009. Focused on open-source medical software and open-data initiatives, OSMSC was awarded a two-year, $1-million National Institutes of Health SBIR Phase II contract in 2011 to build the largest public collection of 3D image data sets of arterial vascular disease with associated patient-specific blood flow simulation results. Wilson led this effort as principal investigator and directed co-investigators at Stanford University, UC San Diego and Marquette University.

Shi Zhang

An expert in consumer behavior and marketing strategy, Associate Professor Shi ("shir") Zhang has been using experimental methods to study marketing problems from a psychological, behavioral perspective in fields that range from product differentiation and market entry to brand naming, advertising and communication. He has also done innovative work using comparison and feature alignability to form strategies for market entry and marketing communications, as well as areas of brand naming and positioning in the international market.

Zhang’s theoretical research interests are in the area of how cognitive representations of information influence consumer cognition and decision making. In particular, he has studied representations of product-differentiating features in consumer preference formation. This research develops a framework to address the role of comparison and feature alignability in forming strategies for market entry and marketing communications.

Zhang is a frequent speaker at professional conferences and seminars, as well as an author of articles in leading journals of marketing, consumer behavior and applied psychology. He has also studied representations of linguistic structures and their impact on information processing, comparative cognitions and decision making. This research provides frameworks for brand naming and international/cross-cultural consumer research, and it suggests how firms can leverage differences between consumers to formulate brand naming and positioning strategies.

Zhang teaches marketing management (strategy and policy, advertising and communications, and global marketing) in UCLA Anderson's EMBA, FEMBA and MBA programs, and he organizes and teaches in the school's executive education programs. He has served as a consultant for international companies such as Google, Roche, Wrigley's and China Unicom. He is a former faculty member of Duke University.