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The Executive Ph.D. that Akwasi Ampofo earned as the first graduate of the Pamplin College of Business program in Spring 2021 is already propelling his career forward.

Sarah Tuskey joined the first cohort of the Executive Ph.D. program in Fall 2016. On the lookout for an executive doctoral program in business that emphasized research, she had been regularly monitoring the membership list of the Executive Doctorate in Business Education Council (EDBAC) to see what new programs were underway or about to launch.

In 2017, Richard Stuebi, long-time energy industry executive, entrepreneur and consultant, became a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Energy at Boston University, assisting faculty and students with energy-related research and entrepreneurial opportunities. In 2021, Stuebi also began lecturing on energy and sustainability at the university’s Questrom School of Business. These two new experiences sparked a desire to cap his professional career of more than 35 years in the energy sector within the realm of academia.

With 15 years of strategic consulting experience and an Executive MBA from Pamplin in 2011, Gelila Sebhatu entered the Executive Ph.D. program unaware of the biggest challenge she would face.

Drawing on what he has learned from numerous years of diverse experience in higher education, information technology, and management consulting, Jeremy Fei Wang, associate professor of Management Information Systems (MIS) at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida, teaches his students how to hone their technical and problem-solving skills and apply academic theories to find solutions to real-world problems.

Stuart Urban’s path leading from a career in industry to one in academia started in 2012 when he began teaching a part-time course, Quantitative Financial Analysis, at Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School. At the time, Urban was a software engineer, research and development principal investigator, and data scientist at Lockheed Martin.

In Fall 2016, Hari Ravella joined the first cohort of the Executive Ph.D. program in the marketing concentration. He had two master’s degrees and 25 years of professional experience in information technology but wanted to broaden his scope of knowledge to include research, believing it to be a career asset whether he remained in industry or transitioned to academia.