Meet the Faculty: Industry Experts Leading Texas Wesleyan’s Online MBA

The best type of executive business education (like the Master of Business Administration) doesn't just teach frameworks. It connects you with the people who use those frameworks every day to move companies forward. At Texas Wesleyan University, our accredited online MBA is led by faculty who bridge scholarship and practice — professionals who hold doctoral degrees and have shipped products, closed deals, redesigned operations, advised executive leadership and more.

Below, discover the kinds of professors you’ll learn from, how their research informs your coursework and the mentorship and career support that help turn classroom insight into workplace momentum.

Why Faculty Expertise Matters in an Online MBA

When you learn from faculty who actively engage with industry, beyond just theory, you gain the habits, tools and skills you can use on the job tomorrow.

Translating Industry Experience Into Career-Ready Learning

In an accredited online MBA, faculty with real operating experience are your shortcut to the ‘so what.’ For instance:

• They show you how they modeled a capital investment decision in a volatile rate environment and what they learned when the forecast met reality.
• They unpack why a seemingly elegant supply plan collapsed and how the team adapted in real time.
• They walk you through the politics of stakeholder buy-in, the speed bumps of cross-functional execution and the hidden trade-offs in pricing, procurement or product launch calendars.

This translation from concept to consequence turns course teachings into instincts you can trust when pressure mounts.

Aligning Coursework With Current Market Needs

Markets move, and so does the curriculum when your professors are dialed into what employers expect. Assignments are calibrated to current challenges: modeling cash flows with rising capital costs, designing dashboards that communicate risk clearly to non-technical leaders and pressure-testing go-to-market plans against shifting consumer behavior and digital privacy norms. Faculty routinely refresh case sets, data sources and project prompts so you practice on today’s questions, not last decade’s. The outcome is a portfolio of deliverables that speaks the language of hiring managers and promotion committees.

Building Leadership and Decision-Making Skills

Leadership shows up in the space between uncertainty and action. Faculty who have led teams and advised executives focus your development on decision quality. Through simulations, role-plays and post-mortems, you’ll practice how to make calls when information is incomplete, how to learn fast from outcomes and how to lead people — especially when the answer is, “We need to pivot.” You’ll be better equipped to build repeatable processes through:

• Framing problems
• Diagnosing root causes
• Structuring options
• Quantifying upside and downside
• Communicating a recommendation with clarity and humility

Meet the Professors

At Texas Wesleyan, you have the chance to study with professor-practitioners whose careers span the core functions that power organizations. Browse online MBA faculty here, and read more about some of their concentration areas below.

Operations and Supply Chain Leaders

Operations faculty often come from manufacturing, health systems, logistics or consumer goods. They’ve negotiated with suppliers across time zones, balanced service levels against carrying costs and redesigned processes to minimize downtime. In class, they bring Kanban boards to life and show you how to map value streams, size safety stock and build sales and operations planning rhythms that actually stick. Expect candid discussions about vendor risk, nearshoring, ethical sourcing and more. Their projects might include optimizing a distribution network or modeling the throughput implications of a new scheduling policy.

Finance and Analytics Practitioners

Finance and business analytics faculty have built financial planning and analysis models that leaders truly use and translated raw data into business cases. Finance professors like Dr. Shengxiong Wu and Dr. Sinan Yildirim will show you how to structure a discounted cash flow or how to reconcile GAAP reality with managerial dashboards. On the analytics side, they’ll help you wrangle data, vet model assumptions and keep visualizations honest and decision-ready.

Marketing and Brand Strategy Experts

Marketing faculty bridge brand strategy and performance metrics. Many have directed campaigns, stewarded brand portfolios or run digital growth experiments. Professors like Dr. Yashar Dehdashti and Dr. Sua Jeon will teach you to segment markets beyond demographics, craft a positioning statement that’s more than clever words and build a test-and-learn plan that respects both the brand and the budget. You’ll leave knowing how to argue for a strategy, measure it and adjust. Case work may explore:

• Channel mix decisions
• Creative briefs
• Pricing experiments
• The ethics of data-driven marketing

Management and Organizational Behavior Scholars

These professors study how people actually work in terms of motivation, culture, influence, conflict and change. Many have consulted on organizational design, leadership development or merger/acquisition integration. Instructors like Dr. Sameer Vaidya, Dr. Trisha Anderson, Dr. Thomas Nichols and Dr. Junghoon Song help you:

• Navigate hybrid work norms.
• Build psychologically safe teams.
• Give and receive feedback that changes behavior.
• Structure meetings that move decisions forward.

Expect hands-on practice with frameworks for negotiations, stakeholder mapping and change communications. You’ll learn to see patterns in team dynamics and build a management routine that sustains performance.

Research Interests That Power the Curriculum

Faculty research is the engine that keeps your coursework relevant, rigorous and forward-looking.

Data-Driven Decision Making and Analytics

Professors investigating analytics translate their findings into assignments that make numbers meaningful. You might examine how to choose the right key performance indicator (KPI) for a multi-product environment or why model interpretability matters for executive trust. Research on causal inference, forecasting accuracy or experiment design becomes lab work where you test competing hypotheses and surface actionable insights. By graduation, you’ll have a better grasp of not only how to build a dashboard, but how to ask whether the dashboard you’re staring at is even answering the right question.

Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Digital Strategy

Faculty studying innovation ecosystems and platform strategy bring a founder’s curiosity into the classroom. You’ll analyze why some ventures cross the chasm and others stall, and you might map a business model, run a market sizing exercise and stress-test a minimum viable product against regulatory and competitive realities. Faculty research on venture financing, corporate innovation labs or product-market fit translates into practical guidance for intrapreneurs launching new initiatives inside established organizations.

Ethics, Sustainability and Global Business Trends

When professors research ethics and sustainability, students grapple with trade-offs that leaders face in real boardrooms. You may explore elements like:

• Supply chain transparency
• Carbon accounting
• Human-centered artificial intelligence (AI)
• The governance structures that turn values into operations

Global business research broadens your lens to currency risk, cultural intelligence, geopolitical shocks and the many ways local norms shape strategy. The goal is more disciplined thinking about long-term value: how organizations create, measure and protect it.

Mentorship and Student Support

Great teaching is personal. Faculty in the online MBA invest in relationships so you can aim higher with confidence.

One-on-One Coaching Office Hours and Feedback Loops

Faculty hold structured office hours and offer one-on-one MBA career coaching to dig into your work, talk through roadblocks and help you tailor assignments to your interests. You’ll get feedback that’s specific and actionable, often delivered within digital tools that track iterations over time. The result is a steady cadence — draft, review and revision — that mirrors the way high-performing teams develop, refine, and deliver work in today’s organizations.

Career Advising, Networking and Alumni Connections

Faculty serve as connectors. They advise on course sequencing for your goals, share job postings that cross their desk and introduce you to industry guests and alumni who can open doors. Panel discussions, virtual meetups and employer talks give you practice asking sharp questions and telling your story. Plus, when a faculty member can vouch for your work ethic and coachability, you stand out to prospective employers.

Guiding Capstones, Consulting Projects and Case Competitions

Capstones and client-based projects are mentored experiences where faculty act as project sponsors and executive coaches. They help you scope deliverables, set stakeholder expectations and keep the team aligned. In case competitions, professors sharpen your analysis and presentation by pushing you to clarify your hypothesis, quantify impact and anticipate questions. You finish with artifacts (e.g., memos, dashboards and decks) that show not only what you know but also how you work.

Real-World Integration

Coursework is designed to feel like “real” work — because it is.

Practitioner-Led Case Studies and Simulations

Case study teaching is curated by faculty from their own engagements and recent market shocks. You might step into the role of an operations VP navigating capacity constraints during a demand spike or a product manager weighing feature roadmap against regulatory change. Interactive simulations force you to make calls in compressed time, watch the consequences unfold, then regroup and try again. Debriefs are frank: what you did well, what you missed and how you’d handle the next iteration.

Live Projects With Employers and Community Partners

Many courses offer live briefs sourced from companies, nonprofits or campus partners — projects with imperfect data and moving targets, plus real stakeholders. You might audit a marketing funnel for a regional brand, model workforce needs for a healthcare system or propose a pricing framework for a services firm. Faculty members manage the relationships and teach you to scope realistically and protect the timeline while communicating progress like a consultant.

Certification Prep Tools, Platforms and Tech Stacks

To complement the MBA toolkit, faculty introduce platforms and certifications that signal readiness to employers. Depending on the course, you may work with spreadsheet modeling, visualization tools or basic analytics programming to sharpen your fluency in decision support. For example:

• Marketing classes may use customer relationship management (CRM) and analytics platforms to analyze campaigns.
• Operations courses may spotlight project management or lean frameworks.
• Strategy courses may introduce widely used industry databases.

Outcomes and Impact

The purpose of an MBA is transformation of your skills, confidence and career trajectory.

Skill Gains and Portfolio-Ready Deliverables

By the time you finish, you’ll have a body of work you can show, like:

• Financial models with clear assumptions and sensitivity analyses
• Executive summaries that distill complex situations into decisive next steps
• Operations plans that map constraints and quantify trade-offs
• Market analyses that triangulate customer insight with competitive intelligence

Internships, Promotions and Role Pivots

MBA career outcomes vary by individual, but faculty mentorship and project work can accelerate your path. Students often leverage course deliverables to propose internal process improvements, earn a stretch assignment or make a case for leading a cross-functional initiative. Others pivot from technical roles into product, operations or finance, using the MBA’s language of value creation to translate their skills for a broader audience. Faculty serve as sounding boards for timing and tactics, helping you sequence steps that make a promotion or pivot realistic.

Lifelong Learning Through Faculty Networks

Graduation isn’t goodbye. Faculty can remain points of contact when you’re vetting an idea, negotiating an offer or navigating a tricky team dynamic. Their research and industry engagement keep you plugged into evolving practice. Webinars, guest talks and alumni events add to a long-term learning loop that keeps the value of your MBA compounding long after the diploma arrives.

How to Connect With Faculty Before You Enroll

You don’t have to wait until the first day of class to get to know the people who will shape your education.

Virtual Info Sessions and Sample Class Experiences

Information sessions give you a feel for the culture and cadence of the program. Look for events where faculty lead mini-lectures or host a Q&A on topics like financial decision making, supply chain resilience or the future of digital marketing. Many sessions include short case discussions or sample assignments so you can sense the teaching style, the pacing and the expectations. Come with an example from your own work to ask how a course might tackle it to get a preview of how personal the learning can be.

Faculty Bios, Publications and Recent Projects

Spend time with faculty bios and skim recent publications, talks or practitioner articles. You’ll see the thread between their research questions and the assignments they design. If a professor studies analytics in service operations, you can anticipate rigorous thinking about demand variability and resource allocation. If another focuses on ethical AI, expect a nuanced discussion about data governance and stakeholder trust. Noting these interests helps you choose electives and identify potential mentors for capstone projects.

Questions to Ask About Research Mentorship and Fit

The best conversations before you apply are specific. Ask how the faculty involves students in research translation. Do they supervise independent studies or advise data-driven projects for employers? Inquire about the kinds of problems capstone teams have solved lately and what “excellent” looks like in a final deliverable. If you’re aiming for a career pivot, ask which sequence of courses builds the skills and artifacts employers in that function want to see. If you have a long-term interest (say, sustainability or entrepreneurship), ask who would be the best business school professors to discuss with.

Explore the Texas Wesleyan University Online MBA

Ready to learn from practitioner-scholars who will challenge you, coach you and champion your growth? Explore Texas Wesleyan’s online MBA. You’ll find a curriculum grounded in real-world application, led by faculty who care about your goals and your impact. From data analytics to digital marketing to healthcare administration, multiple concentrations help you personalize your path.

Study with faculty who have been where you want to go — and who are ready to help you get there. Take the first step by requesting more information today.