Johnson Means Business
About our weekend's faculty and staff
Srinagesh Gavirneni
Assistant Professor of Operations
Management Clifford H. Whitcomb Faculty Fellow
PhD, Carnegie Mellon University
Srinagesh Gavirneni's research interests are in the areas of supply chain management, inventory control, production scheduling, simulation, and optimization. His papers have appeared in Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research, Operations Research Letters, IIE Transactions, Interfaces, and IEEE Transactions on Reliability. Previously, he was an assistant professor in the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Before that he was the chief algorithm design engineer of SmartOps, a Software Architect at Maxager Technology, Inc., and a research scientist with Schlumberger. His undergraduate degree from IIT-Madras is in mechanical engineering and he has received masters degrees from Iowa State University and Carnegie Mellon University.
Candace Maxian Manager
Projects Office
MBA, Long Island University
Candace Maxian comes to the Johnson School with experience ranging from starting her own business, Charting New Horizons Inc., working on Wall Street, running the control board for ABC and NBC radio, and teaching high school students marketing, economics, and business law. At Charting New Horizons, clients included Morgan Stanley, Campbell Soup, Bristol Myers and Morgan, and Lewis and Bokius, an international law firm. As manager of the Projects Office, she works with companies to provide real world projects for faculty and students.
Risa M. Mish '85, JD '88
Lecturer of Management
Director, Leadership Skills Program
JD, Cornell Law School
Risa Mish teaches courses in analytical thinking in business, in addition to serving as director of the leadership skills program. She runs a management consulting and training practice providing strategic employee relations advice and training to senior executives and human resources teams on effective employee recruitment and retention; employee assessment, coaching, and performance management; investigating employee complaints; resolving employee conflicts; and minimizing employment litigation risk. Before returning to Cornell, Mish was a partner in the New York City law firm of Collazo Carling & Mish LLP, where she represented management clients on a wide range of labor and employment law matters, including defense of employment discrimination claims in federal and state courts and administrative agencies, and in labor arbitrations and negotiations under collective bargaining agreements. Before CC&M, Mish was a labor and employment law associate with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in NYC, where she represented Fortune 500 clients in the financial services, consumer products, and manufacturing industries. Mish is admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court and state and federal courts in New York and Massachusetts. Mish earned a BS with Distinction from Cornell University and a JD cum laude from Cornell Law School.
Kathleen M. O'Connor
Associate Professor of Management and Organizations
PhD, University of Illinois
Kathleen O'Connor is an organizational psychologist who studies negotiation, teamwork, and decision making. Much of her recent research focuses on how negotiations link together over time. One stream of work shows that past negotiation experiences direct negotiators' choice of tactics and their performance in successive negotiations. A second stream investigates how negotiators' reputations affect them and their potential for success at the bargaining table. As part of this research, she has explored how negotiators' confidence in their skills, i.e., their self-efficacy, changes as a function of their negotiation successes or failures, and how it affects their tactical decision making and the quality of their deals. O'Connor's recent projects investigate the development of individual social capital. She applies theories of individual cognition and interpersonal behavior to study the conditions under which people recognize and exploit opportunities for building social capital. She is a member of a team of networks experts from Cornell University whose work is sponsored by the Institute for the Social Sciences. Her research has been published in such journals as the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Making, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. O'Connor joined the faculty at Cornell University in 1997. She has been on the faculty of Rice University, and has been a visiting faculty member at Northwestern University, and at the London Business School. She earned a BS from Cornell University and an AM and PhD in social and organizational psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Lisa A. Pastrick
Financial Aid Counselor
Lisa Pastrick has worked at Cornell University since 1982, starting in the university's Undergraduate Financial Aid Office. In 1988, she moved to the Johnson School's Registrar's Office before moving to the Office of Financial Aid.
Ann W. Richards
Director of Financial Aid and Associate Director of Admissions
BA, Wells College
Ann Richards has worked at Cornell University since 1982, first in the Undergraduate Financial Aid Office, then at the Johnson School. Initially serving as the school's registrar and financial aid director, she moved into the Admissions Office in 1998. She is a member of several national and regional financial-aid associations and has served on a number of financial-aid committees and advisory groups.
Randall T. Sawyer
Director of Admissions, Financial Aid and Inclusion
MA, State University of New York at Albany
Randall Sawyer is director of admissions at The Johnson School, serving in this position since March 2006. Before that, he spent two years as public relations officer at the Johnson School and 13 years as a public relations practitioner in and around New York State government. Sawyer served six years in the Pataki Administration as an assistant commissioner of public affairs for several state agencies, and has been press secretary to two NY State Senators, worked for the minority leader in the NY State Assembly and led the communication efforts of a statewide lobbying trade association. He is a native of Newark, New York and resides in Ithaca with his wife, Constance (Thomas) '94, and their two children, Grace and Braeden.
Clinton C. Sidle
Director, Park Leadership Fellows Program
Independent consultant in strategic change, teambuilding, leadership development, and executive coaching
Clint Sidle has over 15 years of experience in facilitating organizational and strategic change efforts for business and non-profit organizations. For over ten years he was the director of strategic planning at Cornell University, and successfully led many change efforts throughout the institution while also working as an independent consultant in the same field. His approach to managing change has proven very powerful. He leverages strategic change efforts with leadership development, team building, and large group intervention techniques to facilitate and deepen the impact of the process. He describes many of his methods in his first book High Impact Tools and Activities for Strategic Planning, published in 1997 by McGraw Hill. Sidle also brings extensive experience in designing and facilitating leadership development programs to his current role of director of the Park Leadership Fellows Program. His design for a leadership development program at Cornell has won national awards and recognition, and the Park Leadership Fellows Program is recognized as a unique and powerful contribution to management education. His developmental approach is based on a unique experiential learning model that has resulted in a popular leadership development program at the Johnson School and is the topic of his most recent book. The Leadership Wheel: Five Steps to Achieving Individual and Organizational Greatness, released by Palgrave Macmillan in September, 2005.
Sandra E. Spataro
Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations
Clifford H. Whitcomb Faculty Fellow
MA, Stanford University PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Sandra Spataro's research examines the influences of the market environment, the demographic composition of the organization, and an organization's formal and informal social structures on individuals' work experiences. Her latest work focuses on the formation of informal status hierarchies in organizations and status differences, among coworkers, that are associated with demographic diversity. Her publications have appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Behavioral Sciences and the Law, and Research in Managing Groups and Teams.
Douglas M. Stayman
Associate Dean for Curriculum and Associate Professor of Marketing
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Douglas Stayman's teaching and research interests are in the areas of advertising and consumer decision making. He came to the Johnson School from the University of Texas at Austin. His research has focused on the study of emotional responses to advertising and the role of affect in decision making. Stayman's work has involved methodological and measurement issues in studying emotions. He is also interested in theoretical accounts of the effects of emotions on people's preferences. Stayman's research has been supported by grants from the Ogilvy Center for Research and Development, the Marketing Science Institute, and the American Academy of Advertising.
L. Joseph Thomas
Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean
Professor of Operations Management
PhD, Yale University
L. Joseph Thomas is the tenth Dean of the S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He brings more than 30 years of experience as a Cornell University faculty member to this post. Most recently, he was Associate Dean For Academic Affairs, responsible for all faculty-related matters at the Johnson School. He has also served as director of the doctoral program, and director of executive education. Thomas is an award-winning teacher, having twice won the Stephen Russell Distinguished Teaching Award. This award is voted upon by members of the five-year reunion class, and is given to a faculty member whose teaching and example have continued to influence graduates five years into their post-MBA careers. Thomas' teaching and research focus on topics in operations management and supply-chain management. He has consulted for and led management-education programs for several Fortune-100 companies, including Osram (and Osram-Sylvania), Accenture, and Sanofi-Aventis (Rhone-Poulenc Rorer). With degrees in Chemical Engineering (BS) and Operations Research (PhD) and a long history of academic scholarship and publishing, Thomas is one the nation's foremost experts in operations management and manufacturing. His work has been widely published on a variety of topics, including redesign of global manufacturing and supply networks, manufacturing strategy, inventory systems, human resources management, and worker motivation. He has also studied models for managing complex production-distribution systems and their effective implementation. Thomas has written four books and more than 50 articles in journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing and Services Operations Management, and Journal of Manufacturing and Operations Management. He was a departmental editor of Management Science for six years and has served on many editorial boards and committees for professional organizations.
