Faculty Directory

Learn from faculty who bridge theory and practice

At UC Davis, you learn from world-class scholars and industry leaders who bring global perspectives and real-world insights into every class. They create a collaborative, high-impact learning environment that combines academic rigor with professional relevance.

Our faculty are more than instructors. They are mentors who know your name, challenge your thinking and support your success. With a low student-to-faculty ratio, you'll build strong, personal connections that continue long after graduation.

Trained at top institutions including Stanford, MIT, Wharton, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Chicago Booth, Cornell and Northwestern, our faculty combine academic expertise with real business experience. Many consult with Fortune 500 firms, lead influential research and advise on public policy.

You’ll engage with complex business problems through case studies, simulations, guest lectures and team projects. This immersive approach turns big ideas into practical tools you can use throughout your career.

10:1

student: faculty ratio

ACCESSIBLE

40%

female faculty

DIVERSE

Top 15%

globally for research impact

HIGH QUALITY

(QS, 2025)

Glossary
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Headshot of James Stevens

James Stevens

Lecturer

Master of Business Administration (MBA), University of Michigan Ross School of Business
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), American University

James Stevens is a lecturer in the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, teaching organizational behavior courses in the MBA program and leadership courses in Executive Education. He brings his more than two decades of leadership and senior management experience into the classroom. That experience includes leading diverse and successful teams, launching new programs and developing compelling curricula.

Suzy Taherian

Suzy Taherian

Lecturer

Master of Business Administration (MBA), Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management

Suzy Taherian has over 20 years of experience as a senior executive for international industrial companies. She started her career with Exxon and Chevron and transitioned to CFO of a mid-size company.

Huy Tran

Huy Tran

Lecturer

Master of Business Administration (MBA), UC Davis Graduate School of Management

Huy Tran brings over 15 years of public and private sector experience in technology leadership, business transformation, continuous improvement, project management and data analytics. He has a career that spans higher education, healthcare and, most recently, Fortune 500 Technology.

Professor Chih-Ling portrait photo

Chih-Ling Tsai

Distinguished Professor of Management (Emeritus)

Ph.D., University of Minnesota

Research Expertise 
Regression analysis, model selection, high-dimensional data, time series, biostatistics, application of statistics in business.

Teaching Field 
Statistics

Professor Chih-Ling Tsai is a recognized expert in the practical application of statistics in business, including regression analysis, model selection, high-dimensional data, time series and biostatistics. He has had more than 100 research papers published in academic journals relating to statistics, marketing, finance and biostatistics. He teaches courses on forecasting and managerial research methods, and time series analysis and forecasting.

Tsai earned a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Minnesota and an Master of Science (M.S.) in mathematics from the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle. He earned his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in mathematics from Tamkang University.

Awards

Ayung Tseng

Ayung Tseng

Assistant Professor

Ph.D., Accounting, Columbia University, 2015
Master of Business Administration (MBA), Finance, Yale University, 2009
Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.), Accounting, National Taiwan University, 2003

Research Expertise
Company disclosure, accounting measurement issues, asset pricing, innovation, healthcare

Headshot of Hemant Vaidya

Hemant Vaidya

Lecturer and Director of Biotechnology Industry Immersion

Ph.D. Microbiology, Sardar Patel University, India
Post Doctoral Fellowship in Clinical Chemistry, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis MO

Research Expertise
Healthcare, In Vitro Diagnostics, product development, executive management, Healthcare Biotechnology

Mary Kay Vona

Mary Kay Vona

Lecturer

Ph.D., Organizational Development and Executive Leadership, The George Washington University, 1997
 

Research Expertise
Research focused on Organizational Transformation, Learning & Development, DE&I and Talent Management (primarily technology enabled transformation). 

Keith Weissglass

Keith Weissglass

Lecturer

MBA, UC Davis Graduate School of Management, 2012
B.A., Psychology, Haverford College, 2005

Keith Weissglass joined the Graduate School of Management as a lecturer in 2018 to teach the Integrated Management Project capstone. He brings to the GSM a wide range of industry experience spanning the private, public, and nonprofit sectors.

Kelly Wilson

Kelly Wilson

Lecturer

Master of Business Administration (MBA), Yale University

Wilson is a principal with Vivid Cyan Studio (vividcyan.com) with more than 30 years of experience in strategy and marketing in both consulting and industry roles. In consulting, she spent a decade as a partner at Accenture and as a principal at Ernst & Young. In industry, she served in senior vice president and chief marketing officer roles with Wells Fargo, Blue Shield, Paradigm and McKesson.

Paul A. Wong

Paul A. Wong

Assistant Professor

Ph.D., Texas A&M University

Research Expertise
Financial reporting, financial analysts, corporate disclosures, auditor/audit firm networks and the role of the audit committee 

Assistant Professor Paul Wong joined the UC Davis Graduate School of Management in 2015 after having worked for Crowe Horwath (formerly Crowe Chizek) from 2007–2011 as a senior staff auditor in the not-for-profit and higher education group.

(530) 752-4983

540 Alumni Lane 3204 Gallagher Hall Davis, CA 95616

David Woodruff

David Woodruff

Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Ph.D., Northwestern University

Research Expertise 
Business analytics, operations and management science, planning and scheduling under uncertainty, optimization

Distinguished Professor David Woodruff's research concerns computational aspects of optimal decision making. He is particularly interested in problems with a mix of discrete and continuous choices with multiple time stages when there is significant uncertainty. His research includes solution algorithms, problem representation and modeling language support. He has worked on applications in operations, logistics, science, and has been involved recently in a number of applications in electrical energy planning and scheduling.

He is one of the developers of Pyomo, (www.pyomo.org) that won the INFORMS Computing Society prize in 2019 and an R&D 100 award in 2016.

From 2013 to 2019 he was editor-in-chief of the INFORMS Journal on Computing, which is a publication of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science. His paper with Jean-Paul Watson titled “Progressive Hedging Innovations for a Class of Stochastic Mixed-integer Resource Allocation Problems” shared the best paper of 2011 award in the journal Computational Management Science. He was the UC Davis principal investigator for the ARPAe (Department of Energy) grant Improved Power System Operation Using Advanced Stochastic Optimization awarded in 2012. He is presently principal investigator for additional Department of Energy funded research on grid planning in the presence of uncertainty due to renewables.

Woodruff teaches the core course Data Analysis for Managers. He sometimes teaches Managing for Operational Excellence and the Management Science course.

Woodruff earned his Ph.D. in industrial engineering and management sciences from Northwestern University. He received both his Master of Science (M.S.) and Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in industrial engineering and engineering management from Stanford University.

He served as associate dean of academic affairs from July 1, 2023 - July 1, 2025.

Awards

  • 2019 INFORMS Computing Society Prize for Pyomo Annual award for the best English language paper or group of related papers dealing with the Operations Research/Computer Science interface
  • Research Grant, Department of Energy Green Electricity Networks, "Improved Power System Operations Using Advanced Stochastic Optimization," Co-Principal Investigator, 2012-14.
  • Electives Courses Teacher of the Year, UC Davis Graduate School of Management, 1994-95, 1996-97, 2000, 2001.  
  • Research Grant, National Science Foundation, "Identification of Outliers in Multivariate Data," 1996.
  • Dissertation Competition Runner-up, Production and Operations Management Society (POMS), 1991.
  • JD Scaife Award, Institution of Manufacturing Engineers, “CONWIP: A Pull Alternative to Kanban,” 1990.
  • Doctoral Colloquium, Operations Research Society of America, 1988.

(530) 752-0515

540 Alumni Lane 3416 Gallagher Hall Davis, CA 95616

Headshot of Jim Wunderman

Jim Wunderman

Lecturer

Lecturer Jim Wunderman serves as the president and chief executive officer of the Bay Area Council, a business-backed public policy organization in the Silicon Valley. Led by its CEO members, the Bay Area Council is the strong, united voice of more than 275 of the largest Bay Area employers, representing more than 500,000 workers, or one of every six private sector employees. Since becoming CEO in 2004, Wunderman has led the 64-year-old public policy organization to become one of the most influential, effective institutions of its kind.

Portrait of Catherine Yang

Catherine Yang

Professor

Ph.D. Operations and Information Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2004
Master of Arts (M.A.), Operations and Information Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2001
Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Management Information Systems, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, 1998

Research Expertise
Business analytics, big data analytics, predictive modeling, artificial intelligence and machine learning

Professor Yinghui (Catherine) Yang focuses her research on business intelligence, big data, machine learning, data mining methods for business applications, online shopping patterns analysis, user profiling, etc. Her research has been published in top-tier journals in information systems, marketing and computer science, including Information Systems Research, Marketing Science, INFORMS Journal on Computing, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and ACM Transactions on Database Systems.

(530) 754-5967

540 Alumni Lane 3418 Gallagher Hall Davis, CA 95616

Keer Yang

Keer Yang

Assistant Professor

Ph.D, Finance, University of Minnesota, 2022

Research Expertise: FinTech, Machine Learning, Financial Intermediaries, Corporate Finance

Keer Yang’s research interests in fintech and machine learning in finance are inspired by the recent revolution in new technologies that affect both financial markets and academic finance research. Through his research, he seeks to understand how financial technologies could contribute to more efficient, equitable, and inclusive financial markets. 

Headshot of Ayako Yasuda

Ayako Yasuda

Professor, Maurice J. and Marcia G. Gallagher Chair in Finance

Ph.D., Economics, Stanford University, 2001

Research Expertise 
Venture Capital, Private Equity, Sustainable Finance, Institutional Investing, Entrepreneurial Finance, Technology Finance 

Ayako Yasuda is a professor of finance at the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis, where she holds the Maurice J. and Marcia G. Gallagher Chair in Finance. She is a senior fellow of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER) and a fellow of the Private Equity Research Consortium.

(530) 752-0775

540 Alumni Lane 3402 Gallagher Hall Davis, CA 95616