This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2019, part two (see part one here). Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments.
Three new faculty members join the Schulich School of Business: Nicole Mead, Grant Packard and Johnny Rungtusanatham.
“The Schulich School of Business is delighted to welcome these three leading management scholars to our Faculty,” said Schulich Dean Dezsö J. Horváth. “They are all highly accomplished in their respective fields and will add to the world-class research and teaching at our school.”
Nicole Mead
Nicole Mead joins Schulich as an associate professor of marketing. In the classroom and in her research, Mead is passionate about using marketing to create a better world. She studies both the “bright” and “dark” sides of money, power and consumption in order to better understand how to help human flourishing – such as helping people better achieve their goals, save more money and enjoy more from less.
Her research has been published in leading scholarly journals such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Consumer Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Mead earned her BSc (Honours) in psychology from UBC and her PhD in social psychology from Florida State University. Prior to joining Schulich, she was a professor at Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics in Portugal, Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands and the University of Melbourne in Australia. In 2013 and 2014, Mead was voted professor of the year by Rotterdam School of Management students.
Grant Packard
Grant Packard is a new associate professor in the marketing area at Schulich. He brings a combination of more than 10 years of senior marketing management experience and his academic training at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business (PhD) to the classroom and laboratory. He has held leadership positions at Indigo Books & Music Inc. and Rogers Media (Excite and Yahoo Canada) and consulted for clients in consumer packaged goods, financial services, retailing, online media, and entertainment for communication agencies BBDO Toronto and DMB&B New York.
Prior to joining Schulich, Packard taught at the Lazaridis School of Business at Wilfrid Laurier University and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. In addition to his PhD at the Ross School, he studied at McGill University (MBA) and the University of Colorado (BSc).
Packard has received several awards for his research expertise, and his work has been published in globally elite managerial and academic outlets, including Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science and Psychological Science.
Broadly, Packard’s research advances theory on language, self-concepts, motivation, social perceptions and persuasion. It offers insights for those who want to understand how and why people talk in social media, online reviews, email and in customer interactions with frontline employees. His current work explores a variety of other linguistic features in market contexts, consumer responses to artificial intelligence assistant use of text versus voice, and how the temporal dynamics of marketplace conversations impact satisfaction and purchase outcomes.
Johnny Rungtusanatham
Johnny Rungtusanatham (PhD, University of Minnesota) is the new Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Supply Chain Management. Prior to joining Schulich, he was the Fisher College of Business Distinguished Professor of Management Sciences at the Ohio State University. Before that, Rungtusanatham held faculty positions with the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University and the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has also been a visiting faculty with the IE Business School in Spain and CUOA (Centro Universitario di Organizzazione Aziendale) Business School in Italy. In 2017, he was visiting Chair professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Rungtusanatham is a 2017 Fellow inductee of, as well as a 2015 Dennis E. Grawoig Distinguished Service Award recipient from, the Decision Sciences Institute. A decorated researcher, he has been recognized with several best paper awards, including a 2018 Best Paper Award from the Journal of Operations Management. He also excels in the classroom, having received teaching awards from four academic institutions globally. He founded and directed the W. P. Carey MBA – Online Program at Arizona State University and, most recently, completed his term as president of the Decision Sciences Institute.
Born in Thailand to parents of Chinese descent, Rungtusanatham speaks Thai and two dialects of Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), as well as a little French.