James “Jim” Bullard, the longest serving sitting president of Federal Reserve Banks and one of the nation’s foremost economists and respected scholar-leaders, was chosen in July 2023 as the dean of the reimagined Mitch Daniels School of Business.
Bullard, who took the reins as the Dr. Samuel R. Allen Dean on August 15, is charged with inspiring, further developing and implementing Purdue’s reimagined approach to a top-ranked business school across undergraduate, graduate, executive and research programs, preparing tomorrow’s business leaders and entrepreneurs in the Daniels School that is grounded in the principles of free enterprise, free market economy in generating opportunities and prosperity, and in the hallmarks of a well-rounded Purdue education and with a particular emphasis on tech-driven, analytics-based business success.
To further reflect and to maximize the impact of Bullard’s unique, national leadership experience, he also serves as Special Advisor to the President of the university, reporting to President Mung Chiang in that capacity. Bullard is also a Distinguished Professor of Service and Professor of Economics in the Daniels School.
Learn more about Jim Bullard.
As a vice president at Element Three, an Indianapolis-based marketing firm, John is particularly passionate about helping growth-minded leaders turn marketing into a core competency and competitive advantage – driving business impact toward company-level goals. He’s done so for many Element Three clients over the years, including Airstream, Beck’s Hybrids, Newmar, Franklin Electric, and more.
Before moving to Indianapolis, John spent a decade as co-founder and lead strategist for Skyhook Interactive, an interactive agency based in Phoenix, Arizona. John has spoken at various conferences for entrepreneurs, designers, and technologists nationwide on technology innovation, building teams, and marketing.
Yu Jeffrey Hu is a full professor and Accenture Chair at Purdue University’s Daniels School of Business. He is also a Distinguished Fellow of INFORMS Information Systems Society, and has been a Digital Fellow at MIT's Initiative on Digital Economy. He is a world-renowned expert on AI, analytics, digital economy, digital transformation, electronic commerce, omni-channel retailing, offline commerce, social media, and fintech. His research uses AI, econometric, and analytical models to quantify consumer behaviors in environments such as electronic commerce, omni-channel retailing, offline commerce, social media, mobile app, fintech, and healthcare.
He coauthored the first paper discovering the "Long Tail" phenomenon in Internet markets, the first paper proving the value of social media in predicting stock markets, and the first paper using interpretable AI to quantify ROI of marketing campaigns. He has been an expert, consultant, or advisor for governments in the U.S., Europe, and Asia and many large companies around the world. He is frequently invited to speak at industry conferences.
His research has been published in top journals such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, Management Information Systems Quarterly, Review of Financial Studies, Marketing Science, and MIT Sloan Management Review. His research has been discussed and cited by media outlets such as Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, InformationWeek, Wired Magazine, TIME Magazine, Forbes Magazine, The Telegraph, National Public Radio, SeekingAlpha.com, and Bankrate.com, among others. His papers have been adopted for classroom use by many top universities around the world.
He has won a number of research awards such as the inaugural Management Science Best Paper Award in Information Systems. He has also won a number of teaching awards, including Georgia Tech’s Course Instructor Opinion Survey Teaching Award and Fulltime MBA Elective Professor of the Year. He has been Georgia Tech’s Hesburgh Award Teaching Fellow and been nominated for Purdue University’s Teaching For Tomorrow Award. Student teams advised by him have won a number of national competitions.
He has built and led degree and non-degree programs and centers. For instance, he co-led the launch of Master of Science in Business Analytics and Information Management, an MBA concentration and an undergraduate certificate in business analytics, and Business Analytics Center, and served as the degree’s associate director and the center’s co-director. He has developed and taught executive education programs to many C-level executives.
He has mentored many PhD students and junior professors who have become tenured, full, or chair professors at top universities in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He has been an associate editor for several top journals and organized several international conferences.
Peter Leyden has spent his career in a wide range of roles figuring out the future, explaining what’s probably coming next, and helping envision how we can build a better world. He came to San Francisco at the beginning of the digital revolution to work with the founders of WIRED magazine, he then learned the futures business working with the founders of the pioneering strategic foresight firm Global Business Network, and eventually founded two of his own media startups focused on the future.
Leyden now is considered a thought leader on the future, on the impact of new technologies, and on the repercussions of megatrends. He has worked for 25 years as a futurist and tech expert through Keppler Speakers, giving keynotes on roughly a monthly basis throughout America. He’s written two influential books on the future that went into multiple languages, and most recently written popular online pieces like The Great Progression, 2025 to 2050. He is regularly interviewed by the media and podcasts.
Leyden also is a senior advisor on strategic foresight operating through his firm Reinvent Futures. He frequently takes what he learns about the future and helps senior leaders of organizations think through the strategic implications of what’s coming in the decade ahead. More at PeterLeyden.com.
As vice president of operations at OBXtek, Jennifer has helped the company grow from a small business doing manual tasking to a mid-tier, competitive government contracting firm with an agile mindset. Her focus is always on continuous improvement and scaling towards process automation for continual growth. She firmly believes that you should learn about all the job functions and as much of the work environment that surrounds you - you never know when that information is going to be useful. She takes pride in building high performing teams and making sure that everything she and her team deliver is adding value to the company, the business, and the future.
Throughout her IT career as a project manager, Jennifer learned from and was involved in every stage of the software development lifecycle, from requirements gathering to post-production helpdesk. This made her an ideal candidate to be one of the first four certified scrum masters at Verizon. She went on to receive her Scaled Agile Framework certification and helped lead the agile transformation in the Program Management Office at Verizon Enterprise.
After leaving Verizon, Jennifer became the program management office (PMO) director at OBXtek and established the company's first Program Management Office (PMO), standardized the strategic goals process by migrating it to Microsoft Power BI providing leadership a centralized location to monitor progress, and built an in-house capture and planning management tool for business development to streamline their processes and create efficiencies. She expanded operational planning to establish the foundation for the company’s outyear projections, developed and established the company’s first transition process that has been marked as a company strength by multiple government clients, and developed and implemented operation strategies and objectives ensuring achievement of organization’s goals and objectives.
Sean has over 20 years of experience helping organizations improve their quality and financial performance through data-driven problem solving. As director of end-to-end commercial excellence at Highmark, he consults with business unit leaders to assess cross-functional processes, and implement analytics driven improvements.
Prior to joining Highmark in 2012, Sean was the manager of billing process assurance and customer enablement at Verizon Business, implementing operational metrics and key performance indicators for critical billing processes.
Sean is a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt with expertise in data and metrics management, and the development of measurement systems to gauge process efficiency and effectiveness. He has a BS in Management from Kettering University, and an MBA from Purdue University.
Professor Mohammad Saifur Rahman is the inaugural Daniels School Chair in Management and a professor of management at Purdue’s Mitch Daniels School of Business. He was named one of the World's Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40 by Poets and Quants in 2017. His research primarily focuses on digitization economics, omnichannel retailing, innovations and inequality, ai and decision making.
Professor Rahman has published in major journals including Management Science, Information Systems Research, and MIT Sloan Management Review. His papers have been accepted in several leading conferences, e.g., Workshop on Information Systems Economics (WISE), International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), and Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST). Also, his research has been supported by multiple major Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grants.
Professor Rahman has been recognized with many different awards and honors. His notable honors include the CICP Faculty Commercialization Award in 2020, INFORMS Sandy Slaughter Early Career Award in 2018, and the Jay N. Ross Young Faculty Scholar Award in 2015.
Prior to joining Purdue as a faculty in 2014, Professor Rahman was an associate professor at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. While at Haskayne, he received the Dean's Award for Outstanding New Scholar in 2010 and the Dean's Award for Outstanding Research Achievement in 2014.
In 2013, Professor Rahman co-chaired the Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST) and, in 2014, served as the president of INFORMS eBusiness Society. He is currently serving as an associate editor of Management Science and Information Systems Research (ISR) and served as the lead organizer for Krannert-Walmart Data Dive, what is believed to be the first data dive on a college campus, as well as the Dawn or Doom Data Dive in cooperation with Cisco.
Professor Rahman's teaching interests mainly lie in Data-Driven Decisions in digital business, web data analytics, digital transformations and markets, data management, and business analytics. Professor Rahman has been recognized as a Krannert Outstanding and Distinguished Teacher at both undergraduate and master's levels (2015-present). While teaching as a doctoral student in 2006 and 2007, he received the Certificate for Distinguished Teaching – the highest recognition at the Daniels School for excellence in teaching by a doctoral student.
Dr. Kasie Roberson is a clinical assistant professor in business communication at the Daniels School of Business, where she also serves as the associate director of outreach and coaching for the Center for Working Well (CWW). She is an executive coach for leadership and performance and a strategic communication expert with industry experience in MarCom.
Within the Daniels School of Business, Dr. Roberson serves as the course coordinator for MGMT 335 Strategic Business Writing, an undergraduate course she personally developed in 2021. Her forthcoming undergraduate textbook, Strategic Business Writing: A People-First Approach, is set to be published in 2024. In addition to MGMT 335, Dr. Roberson teaches courses on executive presence at the master's and MBA levels, along with a PhD communication skills course.
As the director of U.S.A. Operations for Gibson Guitars, Todd Sandefur is responsible for the performance of Gibson’s electric guitar facilities. The Gibson Brands portfolio includes Gibson, the number one guitar brand, as well as many of the most beloved and recognizable music brands, including Epiphone, Kramer, Steinberger, MESA/Boogie, and the Gibson Pro Audio division, KRK Systems.
Before joining Gibson, Sandefur was general manager and chief operations officer of companies owned by Assa Abloy, a global access solutions company whose offerings include products and services related to locks, doors, gates, and entrance automation. He led numerous manufacturing locations across multiple companies under the Assa Abloy brand and drove initiatives that made the sites and companies profitable.
Before joining Assa Abloy, Sandefur spent 19 years in the Tier 1 automotive industry at all levels of leadership, including director of a JIT facility in Alabama that supplies seats to Mercedes Benz. He holds two Bachelor of Science degrees from the Purdue Polytechnic Institute, as well as a master's in engineering management from the University of Dayton.
Kate Zipay is an assistant professor in the organizational behavior and human resources area at Purdue’s Mitch Daniels School of Business. Her research examines the influence of life outside of work on employee emotions, attitudes, and contemporary issues of justice on employee outcomes. Her research has been published in Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Zipay received her PhD from the University of Georgia. Prior to joining the faculty at Purdue, she began her faculty career as an assistant professor at the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon. Before pursuing her doctoral degree, she worked in public accounting at Deloitte.
In 2021, Kate was selected as one of Poets & Quants Top 40 Undergraduate Business Professors. In that same year, she also received the Lundquist College of Business Exceptional Teaching Award for Core Business Courses spanning the 2019-2021 academic years.
In the classroom, she focuses on preparing students to lead effectively in their future organizations and make meaningful contributions to cultivate positive, healthy, and productive workplaces. In the field, she serves on the Making Connections committee for the OB division of the Academy of Management planning flagship professional development workshops for the Academy of Management Annual Conference. She also serves as an ad hoc reviewer for several journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Personnel Psychology, and Journal of Organizational Behavior.
