M.S.M. Faculty

Michael Pirson, Ph.D.
[email protected]
Associate Professor

Michael Pirson joined the Gabelli School of Business as an associate professor of management systems in 2008. A scholar of humanistic management, which holds that business and commerce ought to advance human dignity and society, Dr. Pirson helped to establish an undergraduate sustainable-business concentration at Fordham. He teaches courses such as Social Entrepreneurship, Fundamentals of Management and Principles of Management, and his work spans the undergraduate and graduate levels.

A native of Germany, Professor Pirson has worked and lived in Switzerland, France, China, Costa Rica and the United States. Before beginning his academic career, he worked for an international consulting group for several years and then started his own private consultancy. He has worked for and with businesses, nonprofits, embassies, political campaigns, and local and national governments.

Dr. Pirson is the social entrepreneurship track chair for the Oikos-Ashoka Global Case Writing Competition in Social Entrepreneurship. He is also a founding partner of the Humanistic Management Network, an organization that brings together scholars, practitioners and policymakers around the common goal of creating a 'life-conducive' economic system. In that capacity, he is the co-editor of the Humanism in Business book series, published by Palgrave-McMillan.

Dr. Pirson is a research fellow at Harvard University and serves on the board of three social enterprises in the United States.

Management Faculty

Ahir Gopaldas, Ph.D.
Associate Professor

Ahir Gopaldas is an associate professor of marketing at Fordham University. He holds a Ph.D. in business administration from York University in Toronto, an MBA in finance and marketing from Drexel University in Philadelphia, and a BSE in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Gopaldas examines social trends in consumer markets. Using psychological and sociological theories of change, he uncovers how individuals and organizations challenge the status quo, create new trends, and gradually transform society.

His work has been published in a variety of venues, including Consumption, Markets and Culture, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, and Qualitative Market Research. He also serves on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Consumer Research and Qualitative Market Research.

Prior to his academic career, Dr. Gopaldas worked in finance, marketing, and IT positions at two multinational companies and two startups.

John Hollwitz, Ph.D.
Professor

John Hollwitz is a University Professor of psychology and rhetoric. Before coming to Fordham, he was the A.F. Jacobson Professor of Communications at Creighton University and dean of arts and sciences at Loyola College in Maryland. He also has been the vice president of academic affairs at Fordham.

Professor Hollwitz's teaching interests include management; experimental/quasi-experimental design; statistics; item response theory; structural equation modeling; team-building, especially in high-pressure teams; life-span career development; religion and work. His avocations include martial arts, especially classical Tai Chi sword; blues music; and jazz history, especially in the Columbus Circle area from 1920 through 1935.

Frank Werner, Ph.D.
Associate Professor

Prior to joining Fordham, Dr. Werner taught in the management department at the Polytechnic Institute of New York, in the economics department at Rutgers College and in the accounting department at Baruch College of the City University of New York. He has been an adjunct associate professor at Columbia Business School, where he taught in the MBA program and the master's degree program for executives. Before entering academia, Dr. Werner worked for the Grumman Corporation as a senior contracts administrator on the lunar module program and as assistant to the financial vice president of Grumman's data-systems subsidiary.

Dr. Werner was the graduate division's first recipient of the Gladys and Henry Crown Award for Faculty Excellence in 1985; he won it again in 2004 and 2010. Graduate students selected him to receive the 2008 Stanley Fuchs Award for his impact on and commitment to the student body, and he won the Gabelli School's Teacher of the Year Award in 1986. For the 1993-1994 academic year, he held the James A.F. Stoner Chair in Quality Leadership.

In addition to his responsibilities at Fordham, Dr. Werner advises companies in the areas of corporate finance and quality management. He has worked extensively with financial institutions and airline executives and has given seminars on finance and quality-management topics. Dr. Werner has lectured in English and Spanish throughout North, Central and South America, as well as in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean. He is quoted regularly in the media, especially regarding developments in airline finance and management.

In fall 2013, Dr. Werner was elected to a three-year term on the board of directors of the Academy of Business Education. He supports the academy in its three-part mission: to enhance the teaching of business education and improve the learning environment through educational research, curriculum development and creative pedagogy; to foster interdisciplinary interaction through multidisciplinary meetings and programs, and to encourage and support faculty development.