Leadership Team
The Carlson School benefits from a proven and experienced leadership team dedicated to the school’s long-term success.
Sri Zaheer
Dean
Elmer L. Andersen Chair in Global Corporate Social Responsibility, Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship
BSc, Physics, Women's Christian College, Madras University
MBA, Finance & Control, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
PhD, International Management, Sloan School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Srilata (Sri) Zaheer became the 12th dean of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota on March 8, 2012.
During her tenure as dean of the Carlson School, Sri launched a Military Veterans Initiative to help servicemen and women transition from military to business careers, resulting in the Carlson School being named the number one Military Friendly business school in the nation. Sri has increased the business community’s engagement with the school, resulting in a wealth of new experiential learning opportunities for students, and has overseen the introduction of new degrees in business analytics, supply chain management, finance, and new programs in partnership with Tsinghua University in Beijing and Tongji University in Shanghai, as well as online degrees and certificates.
Sri holds the Elmer L. Andersen Chair in Global Corporate Social Responsibility and her research focus is on international business — a topic on which she has published extensively. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, and a former Consulting Editor of the Journal of International Business Studies. In 2018, Zaheer received the PwC Strategy& Eminent Scholar Award, for lifetime achievement in scholarship from the International Management Division of the Academy of Management.
Prior to academia, Zaheer worked for multinationals such as Tata Consultancy Services and Sandoz (India) Ltd. She also reported on politics and business from India and Nigeria for Business International. These experiences have provided the foundation for her research in international business, as well as leading the Carlson School’s engagement with the corporate community.
Sri serves on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, where she is currently serving as chair. She previously served on the boards of the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), Greater Twin Cities United Way, the Guthrie Theater, and the Destination Medical Center Economic Development Agency of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.
In 2021, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal honored Sri’s professional achievements, leadership qualities, and contributions to the broader Twin Cities community with its Women in Business Career Achievement Award. In 2020, for her service on the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Sri was named an Outstanding Director by Twin Cities Business (TCB). In 2019, Sri was recognized as part of the publication's TCB 100: The 100 People to Know in 2020. Also in 2019, Sri was inducted into the Junior Achievement of the Upper Midwest Business Hall of Fame and honored as a Woman of Distinction by the Girl Scouts of Minnesota and Wisconsin River Valleys. In 2013, Sri was recognized as a Women in Business award winner by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.
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
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
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.
Joel Waldfogel
Associate Dean of MBA Programs
Frederick R Kappel Chair in Applied Economics, Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship
AB, Economics, Brandeis University
PhD, Economics, Stanford University
Joel Waldfogel is the Frederick R. Kappel Chair in Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, an affiliated faculty member at both Minnesota’s Department of Economics and Law School, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Before coming to Carlson, Waldfogel was at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (1997-2010), where he was the Ehrenkranz Family Professor of Business and Public Policy and had served as department chair and associate vice dean. Between 1990 and 1997, he was an assistant and later an associate professor of economics at Yale University.
Joel's main broad research interests are industrial organization and law and economics. He has conducted empirical studies of price advertising, media markets, the operation of differentiated product markets, and issues related to digital products, including piracy, pricing, revenue sharing, and the effects of digitization on the supply of new products.
Most of his research since 2004 has focused on copyright-related issues. He has published papers on the impact of piracy on the revenue of authorized products in recorded music, motion pictures, and television. Since 2010 he has done research, and has published papers, on the broader impacts of digitization on the supply of new products in creative industries.
He has published over 50 articles in scholarly outlets including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the RAND Journal of Economics. He has published two books, The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Harvard University Press, 2007) and Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has also written for Slate. Joel is a co-editor of the Handbook of Media Economics and also co-edited the 2012 Oxford Handbook of the Digital Economy.
Joel teaches the managerial economics course in Carlson's MBA core and developed one of the first online courses in Carlson's MBA program.