Outstanding Chicago Booth Faculty

Dan Adelman is a leading expert in business analytics, helping firms and institutions deploy data and decision analysis to build world-class strategic and tactical management capabilities. He conducts research on foundations of the operations research field, as well as studies the link between operational performance metrics and financial performance. Recent projects include work on the electricity smart grid, gasoline supply chains, software-release planning, and healthcare delivery.

He leads the Healthcare Analytics Laboratory at Chicago Booth, in which teams of students work on real-world projects with providers to improve healthcare delivery through the analysis of large datasets. The lab has conducted projects in population health, hospital readmissions, bundled payment reimbursement, case mix optimization, hospital scheduling, nurse benchmarking, and others. He also serves on the faculty advisory board of the Harry L. Davis Center for Leadership. He publishes regularly and holds editorial positions in leading academic journals, including Area Editor for Operations Research, the flagship journal of the field. He teaches regularly in Chicago Booth's Executive MBA Program.

Adelman received a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research in 1997 from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also received a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering and a Master of Science in Operations Research. He is a recipient of the George B. Dantzig Prize for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice. Adelman joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1997.

Dr. Simone Ahuja is pioneering the idea of “intrapreneurship” and teaching organizations how to act more like fast and frugal startups, to drive sustainable innovation. Simone is the founder of Blood Orange, a global innovation and strategy firm headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is co-author of the international bestseller, Jugaad Innovation, called “the most comprehensive book yet on the subject” of frugal innovation by the Economist. Her latest book, Disrupt-It-Yourself, shares a clear set of tools and a practical playbook that helps organizations drive sustainable innovation by supporting “intrapreneurship” and acting more like fast and frugal startups.

Simone has served as an advisor to MIT’s Practical Impact Alliance and Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. She provides keynotes, interactive workshops, and innovation advisory services to organizations including United HealthGroup, 3M, Procter & Gamble, Target Corp, Stanley Black & Decker, and the World Economic Forum. She serves on the Board of Trustees of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, is regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review online, and a practitioner of improvisational comedy.

Dean Alderucci is an Adjunct Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he teaches the Innovation Strategy and Business Applications of Natural Language Processing courses, and is faculty advisor to the Innovation Group at Chicago Booth. Dean is an innovation consultant with over fifteen years of experience encompassing two areas - processes for innovating and patent protection for innovations.

Dean was previously Vice President of Cantor Fitzgerald, a global financial services firm, where he founded and was Chief Operating Officer of its Innovation Division. Before that he was Senior Vice President of IP Strategy at Walker Digital, an R & D laboratory and business incubator known for creating and spinning off Priceline.com and over a dozen other technology start-ups. Dean operates in all phases of innovation, including teaching how to create new products and services, patent strategy, and commercialization of innovations. He teaches design thinking, ownable innovations, and other popular innovation methodologies. He also developed the field of formal processes for generating innovations that both are patentable and have maximum licensing value.

Dean is an inventor on more than 200 granted U.S. patents, and has been elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. His innovations span a wide range of fields including financial services, gaming, e-commerce systems, microprocessor design, firearms, machine learning, operating systems, and computer networking. Dean's research involves two areas. The first focuses on relatively unexplored areas at the intersection of operations and innovation. His principal research interests include formal strategy frameworks for inventing, applying operations research tools to corporate patent processes, the gaps between design thinking and competitive responses, and protection processes designed for extremely high-value inventions. His second research area is machine learning, including natural language processing and document data mining for patents and other legal documents.

Dean is a frequent speaker at educational institutions, corporations, and organizations on business innovation and management of corporate innovation processes. He has been a faculty member of various organizations that provide continuing legal education to attorneys. Dean is a registered patent attorney, is admitted to practice before various state and federal courts in the U.S., and is a Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales.

Dean holds Master of Science degrees from Columbia University in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, and Operations Research, and a Master of Laws in Innovation & Information Law from New York University School of Law. He also holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering from Boston University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude and was inducted into the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society.

Nicholas W. Alexos joined Univar Solutions in January 2020 as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, bringing in-depth knowledge and expertise around market and margin expansion in the general industrial and consumer sectors. Before joining Univar Solutions, Mr. Alexos served as Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Administrative Officer at Dentsply Sirona, Inc. where he led the growth strategy and executed successful portfolio shaping initiatives. Previously he served as a Managing Director of Madison Dearborn Partners, LLC, where he helped a wide array of portfolio companies achieve growth and margin expansion.

He has served on a number of boards including VWR International, Option Care Health, Sirona Dental Systems, Team Health, Performance Health and various others. He has also served on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations including the Children's Inner City Educational Fund, Lake Forest Country Day School, MetroSquash, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Council, Boys and Girls Clubs of Chicago and the Harvard Dental School of Medicine Advisory Board.

Mr. Alexos received his bachelor’s degree in business from Loyola University, and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Jay Anand is the William H. Davis Chair and Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Strategy at the Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University. He is also the Academic Director of the Center for Innovation Strategies. Prior to joining Fisher, he was faculty at the University of Michigan (Ross). He earned a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India, and master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. His interests include corporate growth, mergers & acquisitions, joint ventures & strategic alliances, global strategy and strategy implementation.

He regularly consults and conducts executive education programs with companies all over the world. He has worked in more than a dozen countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. He has appeared on ABC, NBC and CBS TV News, National Public Radio and Summit Business TV and has been referenced in BBC radio, CEO magazine, The Economist, Financial Times, Forbes, Knowledge@Wharton, New York Times, The Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and other popular media in several countries. He has received several awards for his research and contribution to management knowledge. He has also received numerous awards for teaching in executive, MBA and PhD programs.

He served as the elected chair of the Academy of Management (the largest academic association in the field of management), IM division. Currently he serves as the Senior Editor of Organization Science, Consulting Editor of the Journal of International Business Studies and Associate Editor of the Global Strategy Journal and is a member of the editorial board of the Strategic Management Journal. His research has been published in business press (including the Financial Times, California Management Review and the Columbia Journal of World Business), academic journals (including the Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal and Organization Science), and has been widely presented at research conferences and seminars around the world.

Patricia M. Angus, JD, MIA, TEP, is Founder and CEO of Angus Advisory Group LLC. She is also an Adjunct Professor, founding Managing Director of the Global Family Enterprise Program, and Faculty Director of Enterprising Families Executive Education, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business.

For more than 25 years, she has provided legal and strategic advice to global families and firms with multigenerational businesses, trusts, and philanthropy. Publications include The Beneficiary Primer: A Guide for Beneficiaries of Family Trusts and The Trustee Primer: A Guide for Personal Trustees.

She serves on Advisory Boards of Trusts & Estates and the Carter Center and is a Fellow of and faculty member for FFI. She has an Advanced Certificate in Family Wealth Advising and a Certificate in Family Business Advising from FFI. In 2019 she received the FFI Achievement Award in the Field of Family Enterprise, the Interdisciplinary Award.

Angus holds a B.A. cum laude from Amherst College; a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs; and a J.D. from George Washington University Law School.

Susan Lucia Annunzio (Lucia) is the President and CEO of the Center for High Performance and Associate Adjunct Professor of Management, Executive Education, Chicago Booth.

Acclaimed leadership coach, author, and president and CEO of the Center for High Performance (cfHP), Lucia Annunzio is known by her clients as the “CEO-Whisperer.” She has spent more than 25 years observing, analyzing, and influencing C-Suite and board dynamics, experience that she applies in coaching CEOs and C-suite executives. She is the mastermind of “Elite High-Performance Coaching” – CfHP’s proprietary approach to propel leaders to greatness. She works exclusively with CEO’s, senior executives and rising stars.

Lucia’s work is based on CfHP’s proprietary global research on the factors that accelerate or inhibit profitable growth. It achieved critical acclaim and was presented at such prestigious venues as the World Economic Forum, The International Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change at the University of Greenwich, and Avature’s “Talent Economy” launch event in Belgium.

Lucia is the author of Contagious Success (Portfolio, 2004), a dynamic, award-winning management book that revealed the global standard for high performance. Contagious Success was voted Fast Company's Readers' Choice. Lucia also authored two additional prominent business books: Communicoding (Fine, 1990; Penguin USA, 1991) and Evolutionary Leadership (Simon & Schuster, 2001; Fireside, 2002). She is frequently quoted in the business press such as the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and CNBC. She is currently a Wall Street Journal Contributor.

Lucia is an Associate Adjunct Professor of Management at the University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business, where she teaches the most popular program, High Performance Leadership. She has been a guest lecturer at INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, and Instituto De Empresa in Madrid. She also taught at General Electric’s Crotonville Corporate Training Center.

She is a long-standing member of the Economic Club of Chicago as well as the Chicago Club. She has sat on various not-for-profit boards including the Joffrey Ballet and the Museum of Contemporary Art. She also sits on the Advisory Board of KindWorks AI and Harvard Business Review. Lucia is currently focusing her philanthropy on the National MS Society.

The point where business and politics meet is the main focus of David Bach’s teaching and research activities. “Politics has always been important for business,” he says, “but owing to globalisation and new demands on companies, executives must more than ever engage in skillful political management.”

With considerable professional experience consulting for companies such as McKinsey, Bach watches with interest the way that globalisation and new technologies transform the business environment. The opening up of domestic industries and foreign markets has given companies tremendous new opportunities. However, new public scrutiny facilitated by the Internet and 24-hour news media combined with the need to simultaneously manage different social and political environments is posing fresh challenges. “As a result, the socalled ’non-market environment’ of business is becoming increasingly important for the formulation and implementation of strategy,” he adds.

His ability to join the dots between these interacting forces is also what comes through in his teaching, in courses such as business, government, and society, as well as in his work in leading academic journals, which have published his studies on industry self-regulation, the politics of Internet telephony, the transformation of the music industry, and China’s growing influence in the field of information technology. “There’s only a handful of people with a background in political science that make the transition to management education,” he says. “I’m fortunate to work at the intersection of two incredibly interesting fields.”

PhD in political science, University of California, Berkeley.
MA in political science, University of California, Berkeley.
BA in political science and international studies, magna cum laude, Yale University.
Professor of Strategy and Economic Environment, IE Business School, 2004 to present.
Academic Director of the International MBA Programme, IE Business School, 2004 to present.
Research Associate, Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, Berkeley, 1999 to 2004.
Teaching Assistant, University of California, Berkeley, 1999 to 2003.
Consultancy work with McKinsey, the Global Business Network and Political Intelligence, an international lobbying consulting firm.