Grossman School of Business

Team

Academic Director

Pramodita Sharma

Pramodita (Dita) Sharma is a Professor and the Schlesinger-Grossman Chair of Family Business at the Grossman School of Business (GSB), University of Vermont. She is a visiting professor at the John L. Ward Center for Family Enterprises at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Thomas Schmidheiny Center for Family Enterprise at the Indian School of Business. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Calgary and has received honorary doctorates from the Jönköping University in Sweden, and the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany.

Affiliated Faculty and Post-Doctoral Fellows

Francesco Barbera

Dr. Barbera is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research interests encompass a wide range of topics related to family business, entrepreneurship, small business management, and family business education. Francesco is an award-winning author, educator, and regularly presents at international conferences and workshops. His research has been published in various top-tiered academic journals and industry reports. Francesco’s expertise in the family business field also includes designing and delivering various family business curricula in Australia, Canada, and the USA, directing the family business centers at the University of Adelaide as well as Stetson University, serving on the Editorial Board of the Family Business Review, training advisors via the Family Firm Institute’s GEN program, and regularly coaching at the SG-FECC.

Massimo Baù

Dr. Baù is a Senior Associate Professor in Family Business and Ownership at Jönköping International Business School (JIBS) in Sweden and Director of the Centre for Family Entrepreneurship and Ownership (CeFEO). Massimo is the Research Director and member of the Board of the International Family Enterprise Research Academy (IFERA), a Fellow of the Family Firms Institute (FFI), a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Boards Impact Forum, and co-founder of the European Family Business Centers (EuFBC) Network. Massimo’s research interests relate to the entrepreneurial process exploring the influence of family dynamics on individual and organizational entrepreneurial actions using big data. He is a member of the editorial review boards of ETP, ERD, and JFBS. His teaching activities are focused on Entrepreneurship, Family Business, Creativity, and Research Methods.

Mira Bloemen-Bekx

Dr. Mira Bloemen-Bekx is Professor Regional Innovative Capacity at the Hanze UAS, Groningen, Netherlands. Mira’s dissertation on next generations’ engagement and commitment from Hasselt University, Belgium, received the prestigious ‘Best Doctoral Dissertation Award’ of the Family Firm Institute, USA, in 2020. Mira has enjoyed a distinguished career as an entrepreneur and strategic marketing consultant for SMEs and family businesses and as a lecturer, head of department and dean in higher education. Her academic interests focus on value-driven approach to leading family enterprises, and she focuses on developing ownership competences, impact-driven innovation and ecosystems. Mira serves as the chair or Case Selection Committee and the Judge Orientation Leader of the Schlesinger Global Family Enterprise Case Competition (SG-FECC).

Patrick Callery

Dr. Callery joined the Grossman School of Business in January, 2022. His research focuses on the role of business in addressing societal crises posed by climate change. He has published several journal articles on how voluntary disclosure mechanisms affect corporate environmental management, and is currently studying the challenges facing small companies in emissions-intensive sectors, including family dairy farms in Vermont. Beyond academia, Dr. Callery has worked in a broad range of functional and leadership roles for several companies, from Fortune 100 firms to multiple, successful startups. He attained is Ph.D. in Economics, Environmental Science and Management from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Thomas Chittenden

Thomas Chittenden obtained his MBA from the University of Vermont in 2004. His professional experience includes systems engineering consulting with Competitive Computing, Level 3 Communications and Janus Mutual Funds. He is experienced in financial services, telecommunications, higher education, computer networks and virtualization as well as developing information systems and technology adaptation/integration into existing business processes and workflows.
Thomas currently serves as the co-chair of the Schlesinger Global Family Enterprise Case Competition and a director of the Grossman School of Business Undergraduate Case Competition Program. He has been a State Senator since 2020 serving in the Vermont Legislature on the Finance, Transportation, Education and Joint Information Technology Oversight Committees. He also serves on the New England Board of Higher Education, the Vermont Economic Progress Council, and the Vermont State Infrastructure Bank. He has been elected to the South Burlington City Council three times (2015, 2017, and 2020), twice elected by the faculty of the University of Vermont to serve as their Faculty Senate President and he served as the Chair and Vice Chair of the Green Mountain Transit Authority (2015–2020). He was the 2019 UVM Grossman School of Business Faculty Member of the Year and in 2017 was awarded the University of Vermont President’s Distinguished Lecturer Award.

James Davis

James H. Davis has is the Buehler Endowed Professor of Strategic Management, Chairman of the Marketing and Strategy Department, and Executive Board Member of the Stephan R. Covey Leadership Center in the Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. Professor Davis was the John F. O’Shaughnessy Professor of Family Enterprises and Professor of Strategic Management in the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame for twenty-nine years. He designed and launched the study and practice of entrepreneurship at Notre Dame. He is a member and former chairman of the board for the Successful Transformational Enterprise Program (STEP), a consortium of international family business organization that partners with KPMG.

Professor Davis has conducted award winning research on family business trust, legacy, governance, succession, and strategy. He is well known for the creation of stewardship theory and an integrative model of trust. The Academy of Management Review recognized his trust research as the most influential theory article of the decade 1990-2000. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, holds an MBA (Idaho State University), and Master degree in counseling psychology (Brigham Young University).

Professor Davis has worked with family businesses of all sizes, industries, and generations, as well as major national and multinational corporations throughout the world on such critical issues as governance, succession, legacy, trust, strategic planning, innovation, change leadership and market positioning.

Professor Davis has received numerous outstanding teaching awards at the University of Notre Dame, GISMA (German International School of Management Administration) and at Purdue University.

Rocki-Lee DeWitt

Dr. DeWitt is a Professor of Management at the Grossman School of Business, University of Vermont. She received her Ph.D. in strategic management from Columbia University. An award-winning scholar and teacher, her research, teaching and consulting supports leadership and stewardship of land-based family enterprises. From her experiences growing up on a family farm in New York to study of family/non-family workplace dynamics on Ohio dairy farms, professional experience as an advisor to and leader of performance-challenged enterprises, to current studies of terrorism and bankruptcy in land-based industries and regenerative agriculture, Dr. DeWitt focuses on identifying, understanding and addressing organizational, market, and institutional failures and readying next generation leaders for those challenges.

Edward N. Gamble

Dr. Gamble is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the Grossman School of Business. He joined UVM and GSB in August 2021. Dr. Gamble’s research focuses on how accounting can be utilized to reduce social, environmental, and economic inequality. His research in sustainability and social venturing examines performance measurement, internal controls, social and environmental audits, fraud, social impact measurement, and tax policy. Much of his research was supported by the Initiative for Regulation and Applied Economic Analysis, where he was a research fellow. Dr. Gamble has taught financial accounting, managerial accounting, accounting research, and tax, at both graduate and undergraduate levels. He was the 2018 Montana CPA outstanding educator of the year.

Ante Glavas

Dr. Ante Glavas earned his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University and joined UVM’s Grossman School of Business in August, 2017. He has published numerous publications on environmental and social entrepreneurship/intrapreneurship and was awarded the SAGE 10-Year Impact Award given to one of the three most impactful articles from SAGE’s 1,000+ journals – specifically this was for a co-authored review of Corporate Social Responsibility / Sustainability. His research has been covered in media outlets such as CBS, CNN, Fast Company, Fortune, GeekWire, GreenBiz, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal.
For his teaching, while previously at the University of Notre Dame, Ante received the management professor of the year award.
In practice, he was a senior executive in a Fortune 500 company, founded 3 social enterprises, and received the Presidential medal of honor for his work helping develop Croatia during and after the way. Previously, he has lived in five countries, worked in over 50, and consulted to over 100 organizations, many of them family businesses.

Mark T. Green

Mark T. Green is a family business consultant, speaker, author, educator, and researcher. Mark is co-founder of the Pacific Family Business Institute and leads his own family business consulting firm. He consults for companies internationally on family business issues such as succession, governance, strategy, conflict resolution, and leadership. Previously, Mark was a principal with the Family Business Consulting Group based in Chicago. He was also the A.E. Coleman Chair in Family Business and the Director of the Austin Family Business Program at Oregon State University. He co-founded the Family Enterprise Research Conference (FERC) in 2005 and served as chair of the Educator and Research Conference for the Family Firm Institute.

Mark authored Inside the Multi-Generational Family Business, published by Palgrave Macmillan. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 academic journals, book chapters, and book reviews.

He earned his Ph.D. in economics and political science, and a master’s degree in political economy from the Claremont Graduate School. He holds an MBA from Willamette University’s Atkinson Graduate School of Management and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Cal Poly Pomona.

Stuart L. Hart

Stuart L. Hart is one of the world's top authorities on the implications of environment and poverty for business strategy. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, he is "one of the founding fathers of the 'base of the pyramid' economic theory." He is the Steven Grossman Distinguished Fellow for Sustainable Business, co-founder and former Director of The Sustainable Innovation MBA at the University of Vermont's Grossman School of Business, S.C. Johnson Chair Emeritus in Sustainable Global Enterprise and Professor Emeritus of Management at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, where he founded the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise. He is also Founder and President of Enterprise for a Sustainable World, and Founder of the Base of the Pyramid Global Network.

Caroline Snow

Caroline Seow is the Co-founder of B Lab Singapore and a Strategic Advisor of Sustainability & Impact at the Family Business Network (FBN) International. Her recognition of the importance of cross-sector collaboration led Caroline to venture into the family business, impact, and non-profit space after two decades working in multinational corporations. At FBN, Caroline co-created Polaris – a global movement of Family Business as a Force for Good. A passionate advocate of purpose and shared value, she develops frameworks, content, and platforms to enable businesses to measure, manage, and improve their impacts.
She is an advocate of Certified B Corporations (B Corps); for-profit companies certified by the non-profit B Lab to meet high and rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. Caroline is Chair of Jesuit Refugee Service Singapore, an international NGO that accompanies, serves and advocates for all forcibly displaced persons. She is working with stakeholders across the eco-system - Foundations, NGOs, the private sector and in particular B Corps to create livelihood opportunities for refugees and develop resilience in at-risk communities.
Caroline earned a B.A. in Economics & Sociology from National University of Singapore, a Masters in Education from Monash, Australia and a Masters in Sustainability Leadership from Cambridge University.

Sanjay Sharma

Dr. Sharma became the Dean of the Grossman School of Business on July 1, 2011. During his tenure, he has been responsible for raising over $50 m for the naming of the school as the Grossman School of Business in 2015, 7 new chaired professorships, the doubling of the business school building Kalkin Hall with the addition of Ifshin Hall which was completely privately funded by alumni, launching a new Sustainable Innovation MBA program in 2014 that is ranked #1 in the US by Princeton Review and amongst the top 5 globally by Corporate Knights, a very large increase in student scholarships, the creation of a student success center that advises, supports and provides career services for placement success of students. The undergraduate curriculum was revamped in 2013 as a matrix of concentrations and themes that has led to substantial improvements in selectivity, higher academic quality students while substantially increasing enrollments. The school was ranked amongst top 3 in the US and top 9 in the world in the Positive Impact Ratings released at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2020.

Srini Venugopal

Srinivas (Srini) Venugopal is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Vermont. Srini’s research examines the intertwined nature of consumption and entrepreneurship in subsistence marketplaces where more than a billion poverty-stricken entrepreneurs run micro-enterprises to meet basic consumption needs. His work aims to provide a theoretical foundation for the notion of consumer-entrepreneur duality and test its implications empirically. In a parallel stream of research, he examines how social enterprises entering into contexts of poverty negotiate institutional differences to bring about positive social change. Srini’s dissertation research on subsistence marketplaces has received several discipline wide awards such as the “AMA Entrepreneurial Marketing/Kauffman Doctoral Dissertation Award (2016)” and the “ACR/Sheth Foundation Dissertation Grants in the area of Public Purpose Consumer Research (2015)”.

Marta Widz

Dr. Marta Widz is a faculty member, researcher and trusted advisor, specializing in family business governance, sustainability as well as purposeful ownership, wealth, and family office.

Marta is a founder of Family Silver Institute, Affiliated Faculty at the Family Business Institute at the Grossman Business School of the University of Vermont, USA; Executive in Residence at the INSEAD’s Wendel International Centre for Family Enterprise; Affiliated Faculty at the Stewardship Asia Center in Singapore, as well as an Affiliated Expert of the Institute of Family Business (IBR) in Poland. She also serves as a Regional Governance Partner at the International Board Foundation and is a member of Female Board Pool.

Marta obtained her Ph.D. at the Centre for Family Business at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, was the Research Fellow at IMD Business School, Switzerland, and the leading contributor to the research at the Wealth Management Institute (WMI), Singapore.

Kate Williams

Kate Williams is CEO of 1% for the Planet, a global movement that inspires action and commitment so that our planet and future generations thrive. 1% for the Planet’s global network of thousands of businesses and individuals have donated $100s of millions to environmental partners to date. Kate has led significant growth in the community’s scale and impact, as well as deep work on best practices for implementing high impact giving strategies, growing a network brand, and operating as a thriving workplace with an incredible staff team. Kate earned a BA at Princeton University and an MS at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and has served on a variety of Boards throughout her career. Kate is Mom to two amazing young adults, 30-year partner with her husband, and is a trail runner, hiker with her dog, and kitchen gardener.

Research Affiliates

Ruby Blunt

Ruby expects to graduate from the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business (UVM-GSB) in 2025. While getting a well-rounded undergraduate education, she is concentrating her studies in marketing, sustainability and sociology. Eager to build her skills in data based project management and problem solving, she is excited to contribute towards the sustainability and impact of business organizations. Ruby’s current research is focused on understanding the impact of experiential student focused programs like the Schlesinger Global Family Enterprise Case Competition SG-FECC hosted by UVM-GSB.

Nancy Demuth

Nancy is a member of the Sustainable Innovation MBA cohort of 2022. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Modern Languages from Durham University and previously worked in communications for non-profits specializing in fair trade. Nancy’s research focuses on ethical supply chains and the intergenerational sustainability journeys of family businesses.

Noragh Devlin

Noragh is a member of the Sustainable Innovation MBA cohort of 2024. She holds a Bachelors, Masters, and Professional Studies degree in Opera from the Manhattan School of Music and has worked in Private Equity and Law. Noragh’s research focuses on sustainability strategies within family businesses.

Megan Kida

Megan Kida is a member of the Sustainable Innovation MBA cohort of 2023. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice and Sociology from La Salle University and has over two years of experience working as a paralegal in specialty treatment courts. Megan's research focuses on social sustainability issues within the global value chain.

Ben Lajoie

Ben LaJoie is a member of the Sustainable Innovation MBA 2023 Cohort. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Vermont and has worked in sales and operations roles in multiple industries. Ben’s research focuses on the study of sustainable business strategy within family owned businesses.

Nicole Mallett

Nicole is a member of the 2022 Sustainable Innovation MBA cohort. She received her Bachelors of Arts in Environmental Studies and Sociology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2018, with minors in Poetry and Administration of Justice. With professional background in contracts, pricing, and risk management, Nicole’s research interest centers on ways that social institutions, business, and environment can intersect to create shared value.