NEWS OF NOTE

Get to know our new faculty.

Susan Clemmons brings real-world experience and curiosity into classroom.

Susan Clemmons

Susan Clemmons, who earned her PhD from Florida International University in 2005 and who now is an assistant professor in the Department of Decision Sciences and Information Systems, has been busy teaching in a number of the College of Business Administration’s graduate programs— including the first course offered in the new Downtown MBA. She started on the doctoral path after completing twenty years of experience in corporate America in both information technology and human resources, following a stint as a consultant.

She said she loved consulting because she could “visit organizations, see what they were doing, give them insights, help them, and leave.” Consulting also fit well with her natural curiosity—asking why certain procedures were done the way they were or why organizations functioned the way they did. That curiosity is reflected in the way she engages students and in her approach to research. With her degree in hand, she looks forward to exploring ideas from her dissertation for articles, looking in part at the impact of technology on organizational behaviors.

Eric Cartaya loves to communicate.

Eric Cartaya

When he is awarded his PhD from Virginia Tech, targeted for August, 2006, Eric Cartaya (BA ’97; MBA ’00), assistant professor in the Department of Management and International Business and an expert in human resources (HR) management, will have completed another adventure in a life that has spanned teaching at Virginia Tech, working as a consultant, and crossing the Atlantic on a forty-foot sailboat.

His research area of interest, including that for his dissertation, looks at individual and shared mental models and their effects on learning. Building on his HR expertise, he developed and presented lectures and workshops on crucial workplace issues such as discrimination, workplace safety, and conflict resolution, among other topics, for business clients.