Sanjay Sood’s research and teaching expertise lies in the area of brand equity and consumer decision making. Using psychological principles, Sanjay examines how firms can best build, manage, and leverage strong brand names. This includes investigating what brand names mean to consumers, how to manage brand portfolios, how to use brand naming strategies to launch new products, and how to protect brand names from becoming diluted over time and across geographical boundaries. His research has been published in leading marketing and psychology journals including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, and Cognitive Psychology.

Dr. Sood is an associate editor at the Journal of Marketing, and he is on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology and the Journal of Marketing Research.

Dr. Sood obtained his PhD in marketing from the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. His MBA degree is from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, in marketing and strategy. He gained industry experience in product marketing at Centel Corporation, now a division of Sprint. Before joining Centel, he completed a BS degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Sood has won several awards for excellence in teaching and student mentoring, including the Neidorf Decade Teaching Award at UCLA. Actively involved with industry, Sanjay has worked with several leading marketing companies, including Intel, Starbucks, Disney, Levi-Strauss, Microsoft, and Kaiser Permanente.

Education

Ph.D. in marketing, Graduate School of Business, 1999, Stanford University
M.B.A. in marketing and strategy, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, 1992, Northwestern University
B.S. in electrical engineering with honors, 1987, University of Illinois

Interests

Marketing management, brand management, advertising, consumer behavior

Ian Larkin is an Assistant Professor in the Strategy group at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He researches the optimal use of formal rewards systems by companies, given the complex and often unanticipated effects these systems have on employee motivation and decision making. His research quantifying the cost incurred by a major enterprise software vendor due to salespeople deliberately gaming their sales commission system, published in The Journal of Labor Economics, is one of the most prominently cited empirical studies of incentive system gaming. It was the basis for a case study widely used in MBA classes on compensation and human resource management.

His recent research focuses on corporate awards and other programs companies use to formally recognize employee performance, and demonstrates that these programs often have unintended costs, such as the demotivation of some employee groups. A final stream of research investigates physician prescribing decisions in light of different sales tactics used by pharmaceutical sales representatives. His research has been discussed in a variety of media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes and National Public Radio.

Ian teaches the core Business Strategy course at Anderson. Before coming to Anderson, he was a member of the faculty at Harvard Business School, where he taught an elective MBA course on human resource management, as well as several executive education courses. He received a Ph.D. from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and a M.Sc. from the University of London, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. Ian worked as an Associate and Engagement Manager for McKinsey and Company, based in Hong Kong and Silicon Valley.

Ian’s hobbies include cooking, traveling and supporting the Green Bay Packers.

Dr. Bob McCann is a part of the School’s Management & Organization faculty, where he creates, directs, and teaches management communication and leadership classes across virtually all of Anderson’s MBA degree programs.

He is currently the Chair of the UCLA Thailand Executive Committee, and also serves on the Faculty Advisory Committee of UCLA’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Bob was formerly the Associate Dean for Global Initiatives and the Associate Faculty Director of the Center for Global Management at UCLA Anderson.

Dr. McCann’s areas of research interest include workplace ageism, intergroup communication, and intercultural communication.  He is the principal investigator on UCLA’s multi-year CIBER grant. Dr. McCann has been published in several major refereed communication journals and has won numerous research awards. Bob also serves on the executive editorial board of the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication.

Dr. McCann’s latest book is entitled Ageism at Work: The Role of Communication in a Changing Workplace. The book is available in three languages (Spanish, Catalan, and English).

Prior to his return to the United States, Dr. McCann lived in Asia for nearly 20 years. Most of this time was spent in Thailand, where he worked both in academia at the Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration of Chulalongkorn University and in the private sector (in the spirits industry).

Aside from communication, Dr. McCann teaches courses including Global Leadership, Persuasion & Leadership, Leading & Doing Business in Thailand, and Doing Business in Southeast Asia in Anderson’s FEMBA, EMBA and Executive Education programs. He also teaches undergraduate classes each year in Hong Kong.

Dr. McCann is a frequent media consultant in the areas of management communication, leadership, workplace ageism, and age diversified workplaces, most recently appearing on National Public Radio and in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, US News and World Report, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, GQ, Esquire, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Capital Times, and the International Herald Tribune.

Prior to joining UCLA, Dr. McCann taught at the USC Marshall School of Business. At USC, Dr. McCann was a recipient of the Golden Apple Teaching Award, an honor bestowed by Marshall’s full-time, first year MBA class on its favorite professors. Dr. McCann has received numerous dean’s commendations at UCLA and USC for exemplary teaching.

Education

Ph.D. Communications, UC Santa Barbara
M.A. Applied Linguistics, UCLA
B.A. International Studies, Emory University

Interests

Ageism, Organizational Communication, Social Psychology in Thailand and South East Asia, Persuasion, Personal Development, Communication In and Between Firms, Communications, Cross-Cultural Issues, Culture, Leadership, Human Resources, Asia

Recognition

• Golden Apple Graduate Teaching Award
• National Communication Association Outstanding Dissertation Award in Communication and Aging
• Western States Communication Association Milton Dickens Award for Exemplary Empirical Research
• Brython Davis Research Fellowship
• James J. Bradac Award for Excellence in Research
• George D. McCune Research Fellowship

Lori Santikian is an adjunct associate professor in the Finance and Strategy areas and the faculty director of the Fink Center for Finance at UCLA Anderson School of Management. She holds a B.A. in economics and applied mathematics from UC Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. Prior to joining Anderson, she was an assistant professor of finance and business economics at the USC Marshall School of Business, where she taught MBA and Executive Education courses in valuation and finance. Her research is in the areas of financial intermediation, empirical corporate finance and organizational economics, and has been published in the Journal of Financial Intermediation.

At Anderson, Santikian has won the Citibank Teaching Award, as well as the MBA Teaching Excellence Award chosen by both the full-time and fully employed MBA students. She teaches core business strategy and electives in valuation and data analysis. She also teaches corporate finance at UCLA School of Law.

George T. Geis, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of Information Systems at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Geis teaches at UCLA Anderson in the areas of mergers & acquisitions, financial modeling, entrepreneurship, and accounting.  He has been voted Outstanding Teacher of the Year at UCLA Anderson four times and has received a number of other teaching awards. Geis has also served as Associate Dean and Faculty Director of UCLA Anderson’s Executive MBA program. He is currently Faculty Director of Anderson’s Mergers and Acquisitions Executive program. Geis has also taught mergers and acquisitions at the Haas School, UC Berkeley and has been a visiting professor at Bocconi University (Milan) and at Darden School of Business (University of Virginia).

Dr. Geis is an expert on M&A activity in technology, communications and media markets. His most recent book, Digital Deals, provides a blueprint for planning and executing sound corporate business development strategies. Geis’ research interests include market modeling for M&A-related strategies as well as venture initiation and growth processes.

A National Science Foundation and Woodrow Wilson Honorary Fellow, Dr. Geis has extensive consulting experience and has published dozens of professional articles and six books. He is the recipient of the Financial Executives Institute Award for outstanding achievement in finance.

Dr. Geis taught in the LEAD Summer Institute for minority youth for more than 10 years. He has provided management education for directors of Head Start programs nationwide as well as for Iraq veterans in UCLA’s Entrepreneurs’ Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities. His 16- tape lecture series on “Statistical Analysis in Business” appeared as part of the Teaching Company’s Super Star Teacher series.

Geis is editor of a web site that provides a visual analysis of M&A deals in technology, media and communications markets at http://www.trivergence.com. Geis also writes an M&A blog at http://maprofessor.blogspot.com.

Geis received a B.S. “summa cum laude” and with “honors in mathematics” from Purdue University , an M.B.A. from University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. from University of Southern California.

Anand Bodapati’s research is at the intersection of consumer psychology, decision making, statistics, marketing and computer science. His interests lie in the development of statistical models, methodologies, decision support systems to address marketing problems in value creation, value communication, customer acquisition, customer development, customer retention and the assessment of customer response to marketing. He has worked on customer acquisition targeting, product optimization, consumer preference assessment, conjoint analysis, segmentation, advertising response, direct marketing, customer relationship management, Bayesian statistics and experimental design. Bodapati’s domain-specific interested are in advertising, retailing, direct-marketing, digital marketing and social marketing for health and public policy.

Bodapati’s papers have appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Business and Economics Statistics, Marketing Letters and the Journal of Interactive Marketing. He was awarded the American Marketing Association’s Paul Green Award twice. He is a recipient also of the American Marketing Association’s Lehmann Award and a finalist for the O’Dell Award for his work on recommendation systems. Bodapati was a founding member of the editorial board of the Direct Marketing Association’s Journal of Interactive Marketing and serves on the editorial board of Marketing Science.

At UCLA Anderson, Bodapati teaches courses Digital Marketing Analytics, Customer Analytics and Customer Insights and Market Research. Bodapati has also developed algorithms for marketing technology companies such as Experian, Convertro and Bliss Point Media.

Iris Firstenberg (B.A. ’78, M.A. ’81, Ph.D. ’83) joined the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 2004. She specializes in strategies for creative problem solving and innovative thinking. She conducts custom on-site courses and seminars for organizations on the topics of creativity and innovation. Her sessions provide exciting, thought-provoking and practical strategies to help turn creative ideas into innovative business solutions.

Firstenberg is the recipient of the 2002 UCLA Department of Psychology Faculty Distinguished Teaching Award and the 2011 UCLA Extension Distinguished Teaching Award.