First Semester Faculty

Leonard Branson, Ph.D, CPA and CMA, professor of accountancy and chair of the accountancy department, was a management accountant and a manager for the Holiday Inn Corporation. He received a B.A degree from St. Louis Christian College, an M.A. degree from Lincoln Christian Seminary, an M.B.A. from Illinois State University, and a Ph.D. in business administration from St. Louis University. Branson has served as an instructor of accounting, finance, and management science at McKendree College.

Ranjan Karri, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Management in the College of Business and Management at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Dr. Karri teaches Strategic Management and Leadership and Organization Theory.
Ranjan Karri, Associate Professor of Management, received his Ph.D. in Strategic Management from the Washington State University in 2001. Prior to joining the faculty of UIS, Dr. Karri was a faculty member at Bryant University since 2000, where he received tenure and promotion to associate professor.
His research interests are in the area of entrepreneurship, business ethics, and strategic management. Dr. Karri's research has been published in top tier journals such as Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice and Journal of Business Ethics, as well as practitioner journals such as Business Horizons, Organizational Dynamics and Journal of Academic Ethics.

Nathan Steele, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Management in the College of Business and Management at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Dr. Steele teaches Power and Negotiation and Managing Organizational Behavior.
He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Indiana University in 2004. At Indiana University he primarily studied negotiation and bargaining with Dr. Jerome M. Chertkoff, and completed a minor in quantitative analysis.
Following the completion of his degree, he was awarded a postdoctoral position in the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah as part of their Organizational Behavior group. At the Eccles school, Nathan continued a line of research begun with his dissertation on perceptions of equity or fairness in negotiation scenarios.
His other research interests include a fascination with game theory, especially concepts related to coalition games and concepts of equity and utility within games. Nathan's research primarily centers on using game theoretic paradigms to investigate organizational situations in their simplest form.
He also conducts research along the lines of group processes and has consulted for non-profit attorney's organizations on these topics including team building and intergroup dynamics. His research has been published in refereed professional journals and presented at various refereed national and international conferences.
Nathan's teaching interests include negotiation, group processes, the fundamentals of organizational behavior, and teamwork. Prior to his academic career, Nathan worked as a business analyst for Healthcare Recoveries, Inc., an insurance subrogation firm, and he completed a B.S. at Murray State University.

Atul Agarwal

Specialties:

Cellular manufacturing
Lean Manufacturing
Manufacturing systems specialist
Quality control
Statistical applications in business processes

Description:

Dr. Atul Agarwal, associate professor of Production Operations ManagementPh.D. from the University of Texas at Arlington in Business, with expertise in lean operations, quality control, performance issues, and production systems.
Agarwal finds Kettering students driven, mature, and career-minded, with a "razor-focus" approach to career, and the exposure to the best practices in industry that sets Kettering students apart from students at other universities. He enjoys the closer interaction with students that results from Kettering's small class size. teaching graduate courses through the Distance Learning program.
At the beginning of every term Agarwal tells his students how to pronounce his first name. He tells them to say "tool" with an "A" so it's "Atool." A couple of years later he met a student in a store and the student forgot about "tool" in his name and asked, "Aren't you Mr. Hammer?" Since then, he has stopped introducing himself this way.
He would tell prospective students that Kettering is "the best value for your time and money."
Hidden talents and outside interests: Agarwal isn't all business, all the time. Though he avidly tracks Wall Street activity, he also enjoys reading and writing poetry and literature, playing tennis, and traveling both the United States and abroad.

Dr. Paul McDevitt

Professor McDevitt is the MBA Director at UIS. He has served in numerous capacities in the College of Business and Management over the years, including Interim Dean, Interim Associate Dean, and interim MBA Director. He came to UIS in 1983 intending to stay for a few brief years. More than two decades later he's still here and wondering where the time went.
Dr. McDevitt taught the MBA core marketing course for many years. When new marketing faculty members were hired, he returned to teaching BUS 312, the introductory undergraduate Principles of Marketing class. This is his favorite teaching assignment at this time. He taught his first section of marketing online in Spring 2007 and enjoyed the experience. He also teaches several sections each year of AST 300, the UIS internship program course on campus. McDevitt hopes to be able to teach a sports marketing course at some time during his teaching career.
Paul McDevitt lists his two major accomplishments as his daughter, Kimberly who is a pharmacist working and residing with her family in Minneapolis, MN and his son, Bryan, an electrical engineer working and residing in Chicago. (Ah! That's where the two decades went.) These were joint accomplishments shared, of course, with his wife, Barb.
For many years McDevitt's primary past time was training and racing triathlons. The pinnacle of his racing career was completing in the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon in 1988 in a time of 11 hours, fifty-two minutes and 42 seconds (but who's counting). His time was the 53rd percentile for his age group that year, meeting his objective of a 50th percentile finish. After numerous bike crashes and broken bones and joints, he is currently trying to find another, less risky hobby.

Professor Sanjay Putrevu

Sanjay Putrevu obtained his doctorate in Marketing from the University at Buffalo. He has been at UAlbany since fall 2005 and has taught full-time at universities in the U.S., Canada, Australia, France, and India. He has published widely in the areas of consumer behavior, advertising, retailing, and international marketing. His current research explores consumer response to advertising/IMC, cross-cultural differences, effectiveness of retail and marketing strategies, gender differences in information processing, and the impact of corporate social responsibility on consumer patronage/loyalty. Putrevu serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising, Journal of Consumer Behavior, and Academy of Marketing Science Review.

Professor Donald O'Neal

Donald O'Neal, professor of Management at the University of Illinois at Springfield, is the author of If Not Now, When?, a new book that is designed to help people stop procrastinating and actively pursue their lives' dreams. O'Neal has previously co-edited six volumes of strategic management papers and published a strategic management textbook. Explaining what prompted him to write a book that some might see as a departure from his established areas of expertise, he noted that nearly everything worthwhile that he has accomplished has been through dreaming big, setting goals, and perhaps most important, ignoring naysayers.
"Research has found that when people look back on their lives, what they regret most are the things they didn't do," said O'Neal. "I was fortunate to learn, early in life, that we can do almost anything we set our minds to, even if nobody else believes we can. With this book I hope to help others believe in themselves, and show them how to pursue their dreams."
He continued, "Dreams don't come true by themselves. We have to help them along, one goal at a time. It's fun to dream about the things you hope to do, someday. But if you don't do something about them now, how can you be sure you ever will?"
O'Neal speaks from experience. After a successful career, with executive positions ranging from engineering to sales to vice president of human resources, he took early retirement to complete a doctorate and began a second career in teaching. He has been a member of the UIS faculty since 1992.
At UIS, O'Neal teaches courses in leadership and strategy, organization theory, human resource management, and business ethics. He also serves as a visiting professor in the UIUC China Executive Leadership Program, where he focuses on strategic management, human resource management, and organization design.
He has consulted with a variety of corporate, not-for-profit, and governmental organizations and served as a scholar-in-residence and senior member of the Governor's Illinois Strategic Planning Advisory Council.

Professor Feng-Shun (Leo) Bin

Professor Leo Bin was originally born on the Sun, and then recycled onto the Earth at Guangzhou, China in August 1970. He graduated with a B.A. degree in Economics from Zhongshan University, Guangzhou, China, and then worked at computerizing the financial accounting system for PengCheng Co. Ltd., an international trade company. He came to the US in 1993 for graduate studies at the University of Mississippi and earned his M.A. degree in Economics and Ph.D. in Finance (with two minors in Accounting Theories and Quantitative Methods).
Dr. Bin came to the University of Illinois at Springfield in 2001 and is currently an associate professor in the Business Administration Department. His primary teaching areas include corporate financial management (BUS 302 & BUS 502), financial investment analysis (BUS 443 & BUS 505), financial institution management (BUS 445) and capital budgeting (BUS 446). Dr. Bin has published various journal articles about financial analysis and international investment, focusing on exchange-rate risk, interest-rate risk, market risk, political risk, foreign stocks listed in the US market, and the US policy changes in financial reporting practices.
Leo has also been actively involved in serving the business community. For example, in November 2002, he invited and welcomed executive officials from China's Agricultural Bank to Springfield. Professor Bin and Professor Leonard Branson arranged for Chinese bankers to meet with UIS College of Business and Management faculty and the local banking community (Fifth-Third Bank and National City Bank) regarding US banking practices and Chinese banking reforms. Leo is currently the president of the UIS Chapter of Sigma Beta Delta International Honor Society and also holds the candidateship of the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute. He is a member of the Midwest Finance Association, the St. Louis Society of Financial Analysts, and the Financial Management Association.
Hobbies: Fencing, watching sci-fi movies & TV series, playing computer games, stock picking, teaching people how not to lose money too fast.
Favorite Words: "Put your mouth where your mind is. Put your mind where your money is. Put your money where your mouth is."