Our Faculty
The faculty of the Geneva EMBA consists of academics engaged in rigorous research to provide cutting-edge management knowledge and business professionals who offer practical tools on how to effectively manage organizations.
Our teaching methods include a mix of lectures, case studies, discussions, and interactive class assignments, as well as guest speakers from the Geneva ecosystem. During the EMBA program, our students are in touch with leading executives and managers who provide practical insights on how they have introduced and managed transformative changes, led their businesses responsibly, and built a global advantage.
Our professors in video
Our professors / 1st year-Foundational courses
Previously, he held an Assistant professor (replacement) position in the Economics Department at the University of Ottawa and a Post-doctoral fellow position at the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE). He completed his Ph.D. and M.A. in economics at Université Laval in Québec, Canada and holds two bachelors in economics and political sciences from Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania.
If during his master he was still convinced that he would pursue a career in banking, the Ph.D. helped him to discover a new passion for teaching and a profound interest in microeconomics (incentive theory). The TSE episode only strengthened his intent to apply incentive theory to phenomena like corruption. Currently, he is also working on other asymmetric information related topics like the credence public goods, or the partial verifiability induced contests.
His credo: developing the company means promoting the skills of its employees and allowing them to create an adequate framework to bring out their collective intelligence.
It’s not always easy, it’s always different, we move slowly at the beginning, there are a lot of fears to overcome and it’s not a foregone conclusion. But in the long term, it is the only winning, ethical and sustainable path.
Three pillars to my actions:
– methodological skills: #changemanagement, #lean, #supplychain, #ERP, #KPI, …
– knowledge of the individual: #empowerment, #leadership, #listening
– taste for leading teams: development of #collectiveintelligence
Business expertise and corporate culture are still in the company, you just have to respect them and integrate them at the right level.
Dr. Robert Langan has been an Academic Fellow of the University of Geneva since 2023. He previously worked as Head of Research of the Geneva Centre for Corporate Governance at the University of Geneva from 2020 to 2022, and before that as a post-doctoral researcher from 2019 to 2020. He obtained his Ph.D. in Management, Cum Laude, from IE Business School in 2019 and his MBA from EDHEC Business School in 2015.
Dr. Langan currently works as a Vice President, Corporate Governance at Credit Suisse in Zurich. Prior to that, he worked in CEO & CHRO Advisory at Spencer Stuart in Geneva. He has also worked as an independent consultant, advising several consultancies and organizations in London and Toronto on a variety of topics related to organizational design, strategy, and culture. He began his career in Tennis management in Canada before entering academia.
Dr. Langan teaches in EMBA, MBA and Masters level courses in several European business schools, including EDHEC Business School, Bologna Business School, and Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL). He has won several academic awards and his research has been published in various prestigious academic and practitioner outlets.
– Associate Dean at La Source School of Nursing, HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts
Western Switzerland
– Co-founder of two companies Vie-srl, Teamvision.ai & Fil Blanc sarl and one non-profit organization
Attention, Fragile!
– Founder of the de Ribeaupierre-Graz Foundation and First President (www.fdrg.ch)
Personal development is the way to connect with yourself.
Professional development is about connecting with your environment, from within yourself.
This is what Prof Mercier dedicates his energy, his experience and his passion to.
A leitmotif: Take your place, your whole place.
A state of mind: Consciousness, Confidence, Courage.
Dr. Bernd Vogel is a Professor in Leadership and Founding Director Henley Centre for Leadership UK & Henley Centre for Leadership Africa at Henley Business School, UK.
Bernd has 20 years of global experience in research, educating, speaking, and consulting with companies, business schools and universities. He supports organizations and people in their life-long leadership learning journeys that transform lives, organizations, and society. He bridges academia with practice and is an executive coach.
Bernd has a Master’s Degree in Business Administration and Economics and a PhD in Management from Leibniz University Hannover. He was Lecturer at University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and Leibniz University and had Visiting positions at Claremont Graduate University, USA, IESE Business School, Spain, and Marshall School of Business, USC, USA. Bernd is a certified executive coach.
Bernd’s expertise includes leadership and leadership development; future of work and leadership; strategic leadership to mobilize and sustain healthy energy and performance; organizational energy; organization-wide leadership capability; developing leadership and followership capability; healthy and performing senior management teams; multi-directional leadership for transformations, culture, and change; leadership development architectures.
Prof Mortillaro is a behavioral scientist who is especially interested in the assessment of emotions and their effects on personal and professional lives. He authored several publications in scientific international journals but he also find important and rewarding to transfer scientific knowledge to the society at large and to look for real-world applications of basic scientific findings.
In 2014 he became the head of Applied Research at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (University of Geneva, Switzerland) – one the largest centers in the world entirely devoted to the study of emotion and other affective phenomena.
He has been awarded several grants from public (Swiss National Science Foundation) and private institutions (among others Wrigley Inc.) to investigate the role of emotions in product development and service optimization, as well as for development of new instruments to assess emotions and emotion-related skills. He has published more than 40 international peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals and prestigious edited books, with a total of more than 1400 citations (Source: Google Scholar, November 2017).
His more recent works focus on the role of emotions in the service industry; in this context, in collaboration with his colleagues, he co-developed the first scientifically-validated ability based instrument specifically designed to assess emotional intelligence in the workplace.
Global analytics, innovation, knowledge visualization, and strategy trainer and advisor. Currently working on creating a graphic business knowledge library using the Visual Variation format (visualvariation.com).
Author of 24 books, among them Meet up! (Cambridge University Press, International Book Award), Visual Variation, Sketching at Work, Debias by Design, Dynagrams, Creability, Life Design, Life Design Action Book, Management Atlas, Managing Information Quality, and How to Talk about Data (Financial Times Publishing), as well as over 300 scientific articles (in journals such as Organization Studies, HBR, IEEE, JMMR, Design Studies, Long Range Planning, Management Decision, Journal of Business Communication).
Inventor of the lets-focus software suite, the Confluence Dynagram, the Synergy Map, the Paths to Success ideation method, the VisualVariation.com Patterns, the Concept Skeleton and Idea Blue Print, the Bias Map (bias.visual-literacy.org), the periodic table of visualization, the TUNER debiasing approach, and the CollabCards.com card set.
Research on (visual) communication approaches and challenges: communicating analytics, debiasing by design, collaborative creativity, design thinking, interactive strategizing, knowledge visualization, knowledge communication, as well as information and data quality. One of the top 35 social scientists in Switzerland by citation impact according to Research.com. Research featured in various media outlets including the Harvard Business Review, Inc. magazine, MIT Technology Review, BusinessWeek, Ted.com, or il Sole/24 Ore.
He holds a PhD from the University of Geneva and a Habilitation from the University of St. Gallen. Prior to life in academia, he was a strategy consultant, working in different European countries. Sebastian’s current research is concerned with Artificial Intelligence and its effects on companies and organizations. His research has been published in leading journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Management, Organization Science, and the Strategic Management Journal. He has won multiple awards for excellence in research and teaching. Sebastian has conducted research and consulted top managers at leading companies such as BMW, General Electric, Nestlé, Siemens, and Volkswagen.
Safwan Mchawrab is Full Professor of Finance at Grenoble Ecole de Management (GEM) – France. He obtained his Ph.D. at Paris X University (Nanterre) under the supervision of Prof. Dominique Jacquet in 2009. He has had considerable undergraduate, postgraduate and executive teaching experience in several types of courses in Finance (Financial Analysis, Corporate Finance, Advanced Corporate Finance, M&A and Company Valuation, Financial Restructuring, Financial Strategy etc.), addressed to several types of public, location (France, Lebanon, Singapore, London, Cambridge, Lodz, Bucharest), and delivered in different institution (Business School, Engineering School, University, etc). These experiences (15 years, over 4000 teaching hours) introduced me to the pleasure of leading class discussion and the challenges of transforming materials into useful discussion. In addition, he has been Associate Director of the Master of Science in Finance (GEM) since 2014, where he has gained valuable experience in the field of program management and academic entrepreneurship.
His research is mainly focusing on the valuation of firms. He has published 5 papers in different academic journal related to this topic. His latest article, which tackles cash holding of European public firms, has been published in the journal “Finance”.
Michel Ferrary is Professor of Human Resources Management at the University of Geneva – Faculty of Economics and Management. His research focuses on innovation management, social networks, the labor market and diversity policies.
He is or has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Harvard University, Berkeley and UCLA.
He has published numerous academic articles in scientific journals (Journal of Business Ethics, Economy & Society, Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, California Management Review,…).
He is the author of the book Human Resources Management. Between labor market and strategic actors, Dunod, 272 p.
Michel Ferrary is also the founder of the Skema Observatory for the Feminization of Companies which publishes each year a study on diversity and performance.
https://www.skema-bs.fr/facultes-et-recherche/recherche/observatoire-de-la-feminisation
Our professors / 2nd year-Advanced courses
Dr. Thomas Philbeck is Managing Director at Swiss Foresight and Technology (SWIFT) Partners, a Geneva- based consultancy focused on helping organizations to sustainably integrate emerging technologies. He is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. The former Head of Technology, Society and Policy at the World Economic Forum, Tom led the Forum’s project and content work on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. He currently serves on the advisory board the EU’s Horizon 2020 TechEthos project and is part of the IEEE’s standards working group for AI Governance. He also acts as a Senior Advisor to the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA).
Prof. Dr. Kasia Jagodzinska combines an academic career with international business advisory in the field of negotiations. She served as a senior adviser to the United Nations in Geneva, where she provided assistance in multistakeholder negotiations and conflict of interest management.
As a professor, she works with students from universities in Switzerland, France, Italy, and Poland. She holds a PhD in International Law and is multilingual and multicultural, having lived and worked in several countries.
She is the founder of Negotiation Booster, an innovative approach to business negotiations that leverages the task-related aspects of a negotiation with the underlying emotional factors.
In her role of international negotiation expert, she mentors and trains executives from the biggest corporations in Europe, Asia, the United States, and the Middle East. Working with business professionals from a wide array of industries and sectors gave her an in-depth understanding of the practical challenges they face in the interactions with their negotiation partners. Empowering others to succeed in negotiations is her passion.
Senior executive with 15+ years’ experience of leading high performing interdisciplinary teams across offices in Geneva, New York, Beijing, and San Francisco; currently heading Network and Partnerships in the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution; prior to that, leading the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meetings in Davos and China, as well as its global expert communities; certified facilitator, public speaker, regular commentator on issues at the intersection of technology, society, and the economy; Professor of Practice at the University of Geneva and the Technical University of Munich, amongst others.
Tina C. Ambos is Professor of International Management and the Director of the Research Center for Innovation and Partnerships.
Before joining the University of Geneva, she was a professor at the University of Sussex and the management faculty’s Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange. Earlier she held the chair of the Department of International Management at Johannes Kepler University Linz (Austria), as well as positions at WU Vienna, the University of Edinburgh and London Business School. She received a Venia Docendi (Habilitation) and a Ph.D. from WU Vienna.
Tina’s research and teaching interests include global strategic management and innovation in the context of multinational corporations, technology start-ups and international (non-for-profit) organizations. Her research in this field is regularly presented at the leading conferences and has been published in top international academic as well as practitioner journals.
Prof. Gianasso is a leading HR and Cultural Intelligence (CQ) expert. He has over thirty years of Management, Teaching, Consulting and Diplomatic experience.
A Swiss-Italian national, Guido Gianasso is Professor of Leadership at HEC Paris, based in Qatar. He was previously Associate Dean and Professor of Global Leadership at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Geneva. The focus of his Academia is in Cultural Intelligence and Human Capital Management.
In addition to his role at HEC Paris, Guido Gianasso is a visiting Professor at the University of Geneva and Honorary Consul of Romania in Geneva. He is a frequent speaker at International conferences and consults in Europe and Asia with leading MNCs.
Before moving to the Education sector, Prof. Gianasso worked for many years as Corporate executive and UN diplomat. He was CHRO and Executive Committee member in the Aviation and Security sectors, helping CEOs driving major change programs. From 2003 to 2013 he worked as VP, Human Capital and Executive Committee member of the International Air Transport Association (IATA). He was also the Managing Director of the IATA Training and Development Institute, an organisation providing training solutions to over 50.000 aviation professionals every year.
Prof. Gianasso has lived and worked in Qatar, Singapore, Switzerland, Italy, India, Cuba and the US. He is fluent in English, French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian.
Research Interests:
Cultural Intelligence, Global Leadership and Change Management
Judith Schrempf‐Stirling is Professor of Responsible Management at Geneva School of Economics and Management. She obtained her Ph.D. at HEC Lausanne under the supervision of Prof. Guido Palazzo in 2010. Prior to joining Geneva School of Economics and Management, Judith worked at ESG Management School in France, and the University of Richmond in the United State of America where she taught undergraduate and graduate classes such as Social, Ethical, and Legal Responsibilities of Business, Responsible Marketing, and Sustainability and Accountability of Business. Judith also gained industry experience when working in the Global Citizenship Department at Hewlett‐Packard for over five years.
In her research, Judith explores the ‘political turn’ of corporate responsibility and the role of business in respecting, protecting, and supporting human rights. More specifically, she examines corporate responsibility demands upstreaming the corporate value chain towards and beyond suppliers, down streaming the corporate value chain towards the consumer, and corporate responsibility demands for historic injustices. Her work has been published in international journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Perspectives, AIB Insights, Business & Society, Business Horizons, Business and Human Rights Journal, and Journal of Business Ethics.
Katherine is a Director at the Collective Change Lab, a non-profit providing practical inspiration, insight, and guidance for attaining transformational collective change. Named a “Top 100 Women in Social Entrepreneurship” by the Euclid Network, Katherine is affiliated with many innovation and entrepreneurship networks, including as a founding member of the Geneva Innovation Movement, an elea Fellow at IMD Business School, an Accelerate2030 Advisory Council Member, an Unreasonable Mentor, a board member of award-winning social enterprise Water for People, and an advisor to The Wellbeing Project.
She teaches courses on social innovation and entrepreneurship at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Switzerland, the University of Geneva, and Fordham University and is the author of over 17 publications, articles, and blogs published by International Institute of Economics, Stanford Social Innovation Review, MIT journal Innovations, Forum Agenda, and the Harvard Business School.
Previously, she was Head of Gender & Diversity at Bamboo Capital Partners, a Swiss-based impact investing firm that has deployed nearly USD$400 million across emerging markets since its inception; and from 2012 – 2018 she served as the Executive Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, the sister organization of the World Economic Forum. Since its creation two decades ago, the Schwab Foundation built the largest network of late-stage social entrepreneurs worldwide: more than 350 founders/CEOs with operations in 100 countries.
During her tenure, Katherine launched the first executive education program for social enterprise CEOs at the Harvard Kennedy School on systems change and led the foundation’s seminal research publications: Beyond Organizational Scale: How Social Enterprises Create Systems Change (2017); Social Innovation: A Guide to Achieving Corporate and Societal Value (2016); and Breaking the Binary: Policy Guide to Scaling Social Innovation (2014). Katherine received her B.A. from Dartmouth College and her Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University where she was a Pforzheimer Scholar and Sheldon Knox Fellow.
Institute of Management, GSEM, University of Thomas Fischer is Associate Professor of Responsible Leadership at the Geneva School of Economics and Management (GSEM), University of Geneva. He is also the Yearly Review Editor of The Leadership Quartely, which is the premier journal fully dedicated to leadership research and for the same journal he is currently co- editing a special issue on measuring leadership beyond questionnaires. Thomas received his PhD in Management from the University of Lausanne. Prior to his doctoral research, Thomas obtained a master’s degree in Mathematics from the Technical University Munich, Germany, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and another bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the Catholic University Eichstaett- Ingolstadt, Germany.
Thomas’ work focuses on two topics. First, he studies the conceptualization and measurement of leadership styles. He finds that vast parts of the evidence that supports advice to lead authentically, ethically, or with a transformational style, or more generally, in a “positive” way, is simply wrong. He also offers better concepts and measures of leadership styles. Second, Thomas studies how people talk about (their) leadership. He finds that many people engage in such talk in an effort to appear moral and rational, but do not live up to what they preach—although they are not necessarily hypocrites.
Thomas’ work has appeared in the Academy of Management Annals, Journal of Management, and The Leadership Quarterly. His Annals-paper is currently listed among the four most read articles of this journal; one of his Leadership Quarterly articles won the best paper award in this journal, and another one was the first runner-up for the same award. Moreover, Thomas is an ad-hoc reviewer for the Swiss National Science Foundation as well as for several prestigious journals, including the Journal of Management Studies, the Journal of Business Ethics, the International Journal of Management Reviews, the Organizational Psychology Review, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Prof Katarzyna Wac, PhD, is a Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Geneva, Switzerland and an Invited Professor of Health Informatics at the Department of Computer Science (DIKU), University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and is affiliated with Stanford University and Medical Centre since 2013. Prof Wac holds degrees from Wroclaw University of Technology (Poland) in Computer Science (BSc/MSc, 2003), from University of Twente (the Netherlands) in Telematics (MSc, 2004) and University of Geneva (Switzerland) in Information Systems (PhD, 2009). She is leading the Quality of Life Technologies lab responsibly unleashing the power of data to benefit the quality of life of all individuals. More specifically, the lab’s research interests revolve around the fundamental and algorithmic problems as well as human-centric challenges of the systems enabling an assessment and improvement of human behavior, well-being, health, disease self-management, and quality of life as it unfolds naturally over time and in context.
Prof Dr Thomas Straub is Professor of International Management at the Geneva School of Economics and Management (GSEM), of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Thomas is the director of the Master of Science in Management and co-director of the Executive Health Management programs. Formerly, he was the Vice Dean in charge of Executive Education with at the time more than 45 Executive Education programs (CAS, DAS, MAS and MBAs). At the same time, he is a permanent Visiting Professor and Chairman of the International Scientific Committee at the UNESCO department of the University of Bucharest, Romania and is a permanent Visiting Professor at the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL hospitality business school), Switzerland. Thomas is actively teaching courses in the field of General Management, Business Planning, Corporate Strategy and Change Management. He leads R&D projects at national and international levels (e.g. Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and Swiss Development Agency – SDC). Thomas is a member of several boards and also works as an independent consultant. He has a PhD in economic and social science from HEC (now GSEM), University of Geneva, Switzerland.
Prof. Dr. Diego Kuonen, CStat PStat, founded Statoo Consulting in 2001 and regularly consults on applying statistical engineering and thinking to big data analytics for businesses and government bodies in Switzerland and across Europe at the operational, tactical, and strategic levels. In addition, he is Adjunct Professor of Data Science at the Geneva School of Economics and Management (GSEM) at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and Founding Director of GSEM’s new Master of Science in Business Analytics programme.
Prof. Dr. Diego Kuonen, CStat PStat, graduated in 1998 from the “Institute of Mathematics” at the “Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne” (EPFL) in Switzerland with a master’s degree in Applied Statistics (“MSc in Mathematics”). In 2001 he received a PhD degree in Statistics (“Doctor in Science EPF” – the highest degree delivered at the EPFL). Currently, he is also the Principal Scientific and Strategic Big Data Analytics, Data Innovation and Data Science Advisor for the Directorate and the Board of Management of the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (FSO) in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Co-Author of FSO’s Data Innovation Strategy and he helps the FSO setting up the new national Data Science Competence Center (DSCC) and the new national Competence Network for Artificial Intelligence (CNAI). Furthermore, he is currently the Project Leader of the Federal Data Science Strategy (which was adopted in December 2022 by the Federal Council). He is ranked within several global Big Data, Analytics and Data Science Top 100 Influencers lists, and he is very active on Twitter.
Executive and educator with a multi-faceted and global professional background. Managed multiple complex projects in cross-cultural and multistakeholder environments. Proven ability in promoting interdisciplinary and intergenerational collaboration as well as public-private partnership. Developed specialties in strategic foresight, content curation, event programming, and learning innovation.
His passion is working with experts, educators, entrepreneurs, artists, and philanthropists to empower young people to lead systemic change in their communities. His approach combines systems thinking concepts with adaptive leadership practices and stems from a decade of programming and producing the WEF’s Annual Meeting in Davos (2009-2021). His work at the Villars Institute, the Geneva School of Economics & Management and International Baccalaureate aims to promote systems leadership, to foster intergenerational collaboration and to accelerate the transition to a Net Zero and Nature Positive economy. His teaching and research interests include Disruptive Technologies, International Business, Global Risks, & ESG.
Christian Hildebrand is Executive Director of the “Institute of Behavioral Sciene & Technology” and Full Professor of Marketing Analytics at the University of St. Gallen. He had doctoral and post-doctoral visits at Stanford University, Duke University, and the University of Michigan. His research focuses on leveraging consumer insights from unstructured data (text, voice, image, sensor data) and optimizing consumer-firm interfaces using mobile devices, digital voice assistants, and chatbots. His research has been published in leading academic journals across disciplines (marketing, psychology, and information systems) and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Consumer Research and the International Journal of Research in Marketing. He is frequently working with corporations across industries from consumer electronics (e.g., Logitech) to automotive (e.g., Audi) and the financial industry (e.g., SwissRe).
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