Faculty Advisors

Our experienced faculty advisors support our students throughout the six-month AMR project.

Each team is assigned a faculty advisor who works closely with the team to monitor progress, review documents and presentations, and encourage academic and professional growth. The faculty advisor does not directly manage the interface with companies - that is the purview of the student team.

Many of our advisors have directed and provided consulting services to leading companies all over the world in addition to their academic accomplishments, and so both our students and our partner organizations benefit from their wealth of expertise. They are chosen both for their skills as generalists and for their specialties.

Faculty Advisors

Bill Cockrum

Adjunct Professor, UCLA Anderson School of Management

AREAS OF EXPERTISE: Banking, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Leadership, Venture Capital

Bill Cockrum has won numerous teaching awards, including recognition as the top entrepreneurial professor in the nation in a survey conducted by Business Week in 1996. He has become a legend for a case-study entrepreneurial finance class he has taught for more than 30 years, teaching students the ins and outs of acquiring and sustaining the financing for organizations.

Prior to joining the UCLA faculty, Cockrum spent 25 years in financial services, initially as a marketer and last as CFO/CAO and one of the top senior officers at Becker Paribas Inc. a 3,000-employee investment banking firm. When the company was sold to Merrill Lynch in 1984, Cockrum began his second career as a consultant to chief executive officers. He serves as a consultant in a variety of industries on issues such as organization structure, strategy, marketing, finance and administration.

Shortly after starting consulting, Cockrum in 1985 joined UCLA Anderson and in 1988 became a full-time professor, teaching students the business and finance skills needed to succeed as entrepreneurs. He has taught at UCLA Anderson for more than 30 years. He currently teaches courses on entrepreneurial finance, leadership and business ethics, real-world challenges leaders face and investment management. To date, more than 7,000 students have passed through his classroom. He also is a member of the school's Board of Visitors, the Anderson Alumni Board, the advisory board of the Price Center and the advisory board of the Fink Center, as well as a former member of the UCLA Foundation investment committee and a governor of the foundation.

Cockrum is also a member of the advisory board of the Cranfield School of Management in Cranfield, England, as well as a visiting professor and a member of the advisory board of the Betteny Centre for Entrepreneurship at Cranfield University. He was also a visiting professor at Warwick Business School in Coventry, England, from 2004 to 2013, where he won teaching awards in each year from 2005 to 2012. Currently, Cockrum is a professor and member of the business school’s advisory board at Trinity College Dublin, where he was awarded the top teaching award by students in 2016.

Phone: (310) 825-2985
Email:
bill.cockrum@anderson.ucla.edu

Education
MBA, Harvard University

Michael Montgomery

Lecturer, UCLA Anderson School of Management

AREAS OF EXPERTISE: Mergers, Strategy, Advising, Investment Banking, Media and Technology, Corporate Development

Michael J. Montgomery is an advisor and investor in early-stage companies, an active board member and a lecturer at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Montgomery was the co-founder and president of Montgomery & Co. LLC, a boutique investment bank focused on media and technology, from 2000 through 2013. It specialized in mergers and acquisitions and equity financings for private and public companies, and became known for its focus on the intersection of media and technology. Montgomery & Co. merged its operations into Signal Hill in 2013.

Prior to Montgomery & Co., Montgomery served as president and CEO of Sega GameWorks LLC, a joint venture between Sega, Universal Studios and DreamWorks. It owned and operated family entertainment centers across the United States.

Prior to joining Sega GameWorks, Montgomery was a partner and senior executive of DreamWorks SKG from 1995 to 1996. He was the lead executive for the company’s $900-million equity raise in 1995. He also led its real estate efforts to secure land to build its studio in Glendale and its attempted studio at Playa Vista.

Montgomery joined DreamWorks after a nine-year career at The Walt Disney Company. As assistant treasurer and then vice president and treasurer, he was responsible for numerous innovative financing arrangements conceived and executed for Disney. This includes the $720-million non-recourse advance for the royalties of Tokyo Disneyland, the first large royalty financing conceived for intellectual property. He was also instrumental in Silver Screen 2, 3 and 4, and the $600-million Touchwood film financing. He also proposed and then played a key role in the execution of the initial public offering of Euro Disney in 1989. Upon returning from Paris, he conceived of the first bond with a return indexed to an unrelated security or index. The $927-million zero coupon bond indexed into Euro Disney’s stock value pioneered, via the SEC and Wall Street, the use of derivative-like structures imbedded in bonds. In 1993, he moved to Paris to serve as directeur general and CFO of Euro Disney, where he played an important role in a difficult financial and operational restructuring.

Before joining Disney, Montgomery worked at ARCO in its treasury organization. From 1980 to 1984, he also served as CFO and later president of Arco Solar Europe, a subsidiary of Arco Solar, in Milan, Italy, and later in London. At that time, Arco Solar was the largest solar photovoltaic company in the world.

Montgomery has been a director of Synacor Inc. since December 2011. He was a director of DreamWorks Animation SKG from July 2006 thorough to its sale in August 2016. He chairs the audit committee for Synacor and had the same role at DreamWorks. He is also on the boards of Seriously, Air Bud Entertainment, Open Methods and M3Bio, all private companies.

Montgomery received an MBA from the Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College (1977), where he earned a B.A., magna cum laude (1976), as a Rufus Choate Scholar.

Phone: (310) 463-1389
Email:
michael.montgomery@anderson.ucla.edu

Education
MBA, Dartmouth College, Tuck School of Business
B.A., Economics, Dartmouth College

Paul Park

Lecturer & Senior Faculty Advisor, AMR, UCLA Anderson School of Management

AREAS OF EXPERTISE: Business Law, Nonprofit Law and Management, Social Entrepreneurship

Paul S. Park is a lecturer at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he serves as a faculty advisor for the Applied Management Research program, the Global Access Program and the Strategic Management Research program. Park’s field research projects have focused on international and social impact clients with a variety of business objectives, including venture initiation, market entry, marketing strategy and supply chain management. Park also a lecturer at the UCLA International Institute, where he teaches courses on social entrepreneurship and international business.

Park is a principal of Bethel Counsel PC and provides corporate law and general counsel services to startup, real estate and social enterprise clients. His practice areas include venture initiation, corporate compliance and contract negotiation. Current and past clients have worked in the following industries: technology, health care, real estate development, retail, media, education and social services.

Park previously worked with the Cesar Chavez Foundation, a California 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, in a variety of executive capacities, including executive director, general counsel and chief operating officer. He began his career at the global law firm of O'Melveny & Myers LLP, working on secured lending transactions, venture capital financings and mergers and acquisitions.

Park is admitted to practice in the State of California, and holds a JD from the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, where he served as an editor for the UCLA Law Review. He also received an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was awarded a Global Access Program Fellowship. Paul earned an AB with distinction in History from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Park was previously appointed by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to serve as the president of the City of Los Angeles’ Board of Neighborhood Commissioners. He is also a past president and board member of the Korean American Bar Association of Southern California. He is an active member of the State Bar of California as well as the Los Angeles County Bar Association, and he serves on the board of a number of nonprofit organizations.

Phone: (310) 825-8388
Email:
paul.park@anderson.ucla.edu

Education
MBA, UCLA Anderson School of Management
J.D., UCLA
A.B., Cornell University

Kumar Rajaram

Professor of Decisions, Operations and Technology Management; William E. Leonhard Chair in Management; UCLA Anderson School of Management

AREAS OF EXPERTISE: Operations Management in the Process Industry, Process Improvement in Health Care, Process Improvement in Nonprofits, Retail Operations Management, Theme Park Operations, Operations Management in the Motion Picture Industry

Kumar Rajaram is professor of decisions, operations and technology management and the William E. Leonhard Chair in Management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Rajaram’s current research interests include improving operations in the health care industry, nonprofit sector and process manufacturing sector, including food processing, pharmaceuticals and the petrochemical industry. He has focused on developing analytical models of complicated systems, with a strong emphasis on practical implementation.

Rajaram’s work has been published in leading research journals such as Operations Research, Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Marketing Science and Production and Operations Management. He has been awarded the Eric and E Juline Faculty Excellence in Research Award at UCLA Anderson.

Rajaram developed a new control paradigm called robust process control to increase the productivity of large-scale industrial processes. By focusing on the design and control of these processes in operational environments, this technique has resulted in four-fold increases in productivity in several types of industrial processes. These methods have been implemented at several process companies worldwide. For this work, he has been recognized by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) as a Franz Edelman Laureate for outstanding applications of operations research and management science techniques to practice. He has also developed techniques to better balance supply with demand for products with short life cycles and highly unpredictable demand. This work has been applied at several large fashion retailers in Europe and North America, and has resulted in substantial improvements to profitability at these sites. He has also worked in developing analytical models to improve planning for HIV/AIDS screening, testing and care at the Veterans Administration. In addition, he has worked at improving patient flows at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and has developed models to improve staff and operating room assignments for surgeries at this hospital.

Phone: (310) 825-4154
Email:
kumar.rajaram@anderson.ucla.edu

Education
Ph.D., Operations Management, 1998, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
M.A., Managerial Science and Applied Economics, 1997, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
M.S., Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, 1993, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
M.Sc., Mathematics, with Honors, 1991, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India
B.E., Electrical and Electronics Engineering, with Honors, 1991, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India

William Yu

Economist, Anderson Forecast, UCLA Anderson School of Management Forecast

AREAS OF EXPERTISE: Economics, Forecasting, Data Analytics, U.S.–China Economies, Housing Markets, Human Capital

William Yu joined the UCLA Anderson Forecast in 2011 as an economist. At Forecast, Yu focuses on economic modeling, forecasting and the Los Angeles economy. He also conducts research on and forecasts for China’s economy and its relationship with the U.S. economy. His research interests include a wide range of economic and financial issues, such as time series econometrics, data analytics, housing markets, human capital and innovation.

Yu teaches business forecasting, predictive analytics and data science courses at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and UCLA Extension. In 2019, he received the distinguished instructor award for digital technology from UCLA Extension. He also serves as a faculty advisor for the Applied Management Research program at UCLA Anderson.

Yu has published over a dozen research articles in Journal of Forecasting, International Journal of Forecasting, Journal of International Money and Finance and others. He also wrote op-ed articles in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers. He developed the City Human Capital Index and the Los Angeles City Employment Estimate, and he wrote the quarterly U.S.–China economic report. He has been cited in the local, national and overseas media frequently, including the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Bloomberg, CBS Money Watch, Al Jazeera, U-T San Diego, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Daily Breeze, Straits Times, NBC, ABC, CNBC, CNN and NPR, as well as various Chinese and Korean media. He was invited as a speaker for various events, including the annual Wilbur K. Woo Greater China Business Conference, Cathay Bank economic outlook luncheons and National Association for Business Economics conferences.

Yu received his bachelor’s degree in finance from National Taiwan University in 1995 and was an analyst in Fubon Financial Holding in Taipei from 1997 to 2000. In 2006, he received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Washington, where he was also an economics instructor and won two distinguished teaching awards. In 2006, he worked for the Frank Russell Investment Group for Treasury and corporate yields modeling and forecasting. From 2006 to 2011, he served as an assistant and an associate professor of economics at Winona State University, where he taught courses including forecasting methods, managerial economics, international economics, and macroeconomics.

Phone: (310) 825-7805
Email:
william.yu@anderson.ucla.edu

Education
Ph.D., Economics, University of Washington
B.S., Finance, National Taiwan University

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