School Leadership

The Carlson School benefits from a proven and experienced leadership team dedicated to the school’s long-term success.

Jamie Prenkert

Jamie Prenkert

Dean        
Investors in Leadership Distinguished Chair        
BA, Anderson University        
JD, Harvard Law School

Jamie Darin Prenkert is the 13th dean of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. He began his tenure on July 3, 2023, leading a school of 5,000 current students and 400+ faculty and staff, with 60,000 alumni in more than 100 countries. In addition, Professor Prenkert is the Investors in Leadership Distinguished Chair. 

Prior to joining the Carlson School, Prenkert served as Executive Associate Dean for Faculty and Research and Charles M. Hewitt Professor at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University-Bloomington. During his 20 years at Indiana, he served in several administrative leadership roles and taught undergraduate and graduate-level courses. 

His research focuses on issues of employment discrimination and the human rights obligations of transnational corporations. He is the lead coauthor of a leading business law/legal environment of business textbook, Business Law: The Global, Ethical, and Digital Environment, currently in its 18th Edition. 

Prior to joining the Kelley School faculty, Dean Prenkert was a senior trial attorney for the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He also practiced with the law firm of Baker & Daniels (now Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP). 

He earned a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School and a B.A., summa cum laude with honors in Political Science, from Anderson University.


Alok Gupta

Alok Gupta

Associate Dean of Faculty and Research Curtis L. Carlson School-wide Chair in Information Management, Information and Decision Sciences
BS, Mining Engineering Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University
MS, Mine Electrical Systems, Pennsylvania State University
PhD, Management Science and Information Systems, University of Texas-Austin

Alok Gupta is the Curtis L. Carlson School-wide Chair in Information Management, and the former chair of the Information and Decision Sciences Department at the Carlson School. His research has appeared in several information systems, economics, and computer science journals. Gupta was awarded the prestigious NSF CAREER Award for his research on dynamic pricing mechanisms on the internet in 2001, and named an INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) Distinguished Fellow in 2014.

From 1999-2001, he served as co-director of Treibick Electronic Commerce Initiative (TECI), an endowed research initiative in the Operations and Information Management Department at the University of Connecticut. Currently, Gupta is an affiliate of the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce (CREC) at the University of Texas at Austin, editor in chief of Information Systems Research and associate editor of Management Science. He has served as publisher of MIS Quarterly since 2005.


Stephen T Parente

Stephen Parente

Associate Dean of Carlson Global Institute 
Professor, Minnesota Insurance Industry Chair Of Health Finance 
BA, Health and Society, University of Rochester-New Yorks 
MS, Public Policy Analysis, University of Rochester-New York 
MPH, Health Economics, University of Rochester-New York 
PhD, Health Finance and Organization, Johns Hopkins University

Stephen T. Parente, PhD, MPH, MS is a Professor in the Department of Finance and the Minnesota Insurance Industry Chair of Health Finance in Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. From 2014-2017, he served as Associate Dean of MBA and MS programs. Dr. Parente is the longest serving Director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute (2006-2017). As a Professor in the Finance Department, he specializes in health economics, information technology, and health insurance. Dr. Parente has been the principal investigator on large funded-studies regarding consumer directed health plans, health information technology and health policy micro-simulation. In Washington DC, he served as the Governing Chair of the Health Care Cost Institute from 2013 to 2017. He is the Founding Director of the Medical Valuation Laboratory, a nine college interdisciplinary effort to accelerate medical innovation from scientists, clinicians and entrepreneurs. Dr. Parente was a health policy advisor for the McCain 2008 Presidential Campaign and served as Legislative Fellow in the office of Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D‑WV) in 1992/93. He has a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University.


Vlad Griskevicius

Vlad Griskevicius, Associate Dean of the Undergraduate Program

Associate Dean of the Undergraduate Program
Carlson Family Foundation Chair in Marketing
BA, Economics & Psychology, University of California at Santa Cruz
PhD, Psychology, Arizona State University

Vlad Griskevicius has an extensive background in psychology, communication and motivation. He believes that education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. As Associate Dean, he aspires to light the fires of 3000 students through a truly transformative educational experience that enables every student to become their best self.

In addition to teaching courses on the Power of Story, Persuasion & Influence, and Designing Your Life, Vlad has published over 100 scholarly works and is co-author of The Rational Animal – a book about how our deep-seated ancestral motivations shape modern behavior. He previously served as Chair of the Marketing Department and as Associate Editor of the Journal of Marketing Research. His life goal is to raise his four kids — and all the students he encounters — to be good human beings and to never stop learning because life never stops teaching.


Mary Zellmer-Bruhn

Headshot of Mary Zellmer-Bruhn, Associate Dean of MBA and MS Programs

Associate Dean of MBA and MS Programs

BBA, Marketing, University of Wisconsin
MS, Management, University of Wisconsin
PhD, Organizational Behavior, University of Wisconsin

Mary Zellmer-Bruhn is a Professor in the Work and Organizations Department. From 2019-2023 she served as Department Chair. Her research focuses on teamwork, including the formation and design of teams, entrepreneurial teams, and cross-cultural teamwork. Recent work adds a focus on language diversity and the experiences of migrants at work. Her research is published in numerous premiere journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, Organization Science, and the Strategic Management Journal. Professor Zellmer-Bruhn currently serves as Senior Editor for Organization Science and has previously served as Area Editor for the Journal of International Business Studies. Professor Zellmer-Bruhn teaches courses on the management of teams, organizational behavior, and cross-cultural management along with numerous executive education offerings. She has received the Carlson School's Excellence in Teaching, Outstanding Honor's Faculty and the Carlson Executive MBA Curtis Cup Award for Excellence teaching awards. Professor Zellmer-Bruhn has a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Â