Faculty Advisory Committee

Victoria Medvec's Portrait

Victoria Medvec

Adeline Barry Davee Professor of Management and Organizations
Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Kellogg Center for Executive Women
Kellogg Global Women’s Summit Steering Committee Co-Chair, Faculty Advisory Committee Chair and Planning Committee Co-Chair

Dr. Victoria Medvec is the Adeline Barry Davee professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and a co-founder and the executive director of the Kellogg Center for Executive Women. She has a tremendous passion for helping women succeed at the highest levels in organizations.

Dr. Medvec is also a leading expert in negotiation. For more than two decades, Dr. Medvec has developed strategy to guide organizations in complex negotiations that have changed their market positions and sparked dramatic revenue growth. As the chief executive officer of Medvec and Associates, she advises CEOs, senior leaders and board members on critical decisions and high-stakes negotiations including mergers, acquisitions, significant customer contracts, regulatory filings and partnership agreements.

Her clients include many Fortune 100 companies as well as smaller growth-oriented organizations across a wide variety of industries including Microsoft, McKinsey, Johnson&Johnson, OMERS, American Securities, McDonald's, Pfizer, BlackRock, Amgen, Instagram, BCG, Omnicom Media Group and GE.

Dr. Medvec has served on public and private boards for more than 10 years. In addition, she is a Ringleader in Ringleader Ventures, a unique venture fund pairing startup technology with corporate needs.

Bernie Banks' Portrait

Bernard Banks '08

Associate Dean for Leadership Development
Clinical Professor of Management

Bernard (Bernie) Banks is a noted expert on the subjects of leadership and organizational change. Currently, he is the associate dean for leadership development and a clinical professor of management at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. As an associate dean, Dean Banks possesses responsibility for leader development integration across the school's global portfolio of programs.

Dean Banks retired from the U.S. Army as a brigadier general in 2016 after having successfully led West Point's Department of Behavioral Sciences & Leadership from 2012 to 2016. In addition to having studied leadership extensively, he has led multiple military units ranging in size from 10 to 500 people. In 1995, Dean Banks was selected from more than 40,000 officers to receive the Army's top award for entry-level managers (General Douglas MacArthur Leadership Award). In 2006, the Apache Helicopter unit he was leading in South Korea was designated as the top Apache Helicopter unit globally in the Army's annual best aviation unit competition.

A West Point graduate, Dean Banks is broadly educated. He holds graduate degrees from Northwestern, Columbia and Harvard Universities. Additionally, he earned his PhD in social-organizational psychology from Columbia University. Dean Banks has published work in a variety of outlets. Furthermore, he has worked extensively with organizations across all sectors concerning their leader development efforts.

An active member of several civic and professional organizations (e.g., The Chicago Club, Harvard Club of NYC, Community Solutions of NYC, West Point Society of Chicago), Dean Banks is deeply invested in his community.

Julie Hennessy's Portrait

Julie Hennessy

Clinical Professor of Marketing
Associate Chair of the Marketing Department

Julie Hennessy is a clinical professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the associate chair of the Marketing Department. Professor Hennessy's MBA and executive teaching focuses on the development of marketing strategies to enhance long-term competitive advantage and profitability. She works frequently with research and technology-driven firms that desire to become more customer-centric, in both new product/services and mature product/services categories.

At Kellogg, she teaches three courses: Introduction to Marketing, Advanced Marketing Strategy, and the Marketing Consulting Course: Generating Profitable Growth. In addition to MBA courses, she teaches extensively at the executive level. Recent executive teaching assignments have included work with Facebook, Hyatt, SC Johnson, Abbvie, Novartis, Nestle, McDonalds, Microsoft, ABInBev, John Deere, Kraft and Textron.

Professor Hennessy has been a regular recipient of teaching awards at the Kellogg School. In both 2017 and 2007, she received the Lawrence G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year Award, Kellogg's top award for teaching quality and impact, as voted by the Kellogg graduating class. She had been a finalist (top five faculty members) in consideration for the Lavengood Award in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. Professor Hennessy has also been recognized by her academic department, winning the Marketing Department's Core Course Teaching Award. She has also received special student impact awards in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2016 and 2017.

Professor Hennessy's writing concentrates on cases for classroom use. Recent cases written include studies of Teach for India, Northwestern Memorial Hospital Hispanic Organ Transplant Program, Synthroid, TiVo, Apple iPod, Invisalign Orthodontics and Biaxin and Zithromax in the antibiotics market.

Kathleen Hagerty's Portrait

Kathleen Hagerty

Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Research
Faculty Director, PhD Program
First Chicago Professorship in Finance
Professor of Finance

Kathleen M. Hagerty holds the First Chicago professorship in finance and was senior associate dean: faculty and research from 2005 to 2010.

Professor Hagerty has published widely in finance and economics journals. Her work has studied the microstructure of securities markets, disclosure regulation, insider trading regulation and the effectiveness of self-regulatory organizations. She received a Bradley Foundation Research Fellowship and received the D.P. Jacobs Prize for the Most Significant Paper in the Journal of Financial Intermediation.

She has been a member of the editorial board of the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Financial Markets. She received her PhD from Stanford University.

Lauren Rivera's Portrait

Lauren Rivera

Associate Professor of Management and Organizations
Associate Professor of Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences (by courtesy)

Lauren Rivera is an expert on selection procedures and has written extensively on hiring and promotion practices in elite professional service firms. Her award-winning book "Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs" (Princeton University Press, 2015) investigates hiring decisions for top-tier investment banks, consulting firms and law firms.

Her research has been featured in the Atlantic, Economist, Financial Times, Fortune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and NPR. In recognition for her work, Professor Rivera received the American Sociological Association's William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. She has been named one of the top 40 business school professors under 40 by Poets&Quants and a rising management star by Thinkers50.

She received her B.A. in psychology and sociology from Yale University and her PhD in sociology from Harvard University.

Paola Saiennza's Portrait

Paola Sapienza

Donald C. Clark/HSBC Chair in Consumer Finance
Professor of Finance

Paola Sapienza is the Donald C. Clark/HSBC Chair in Consumer Finance professor at the Kellogg School of Management. She also serves as a faculty research fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research's program on corporate finance and political economy, and has previously served as a faculty fellow in the former Zell Center for Risk Research, a research affiliate of the Center for Economic Policy Research.

Professor Sapienza's areas of expertise include banking and financial institutions, behavioral economics, behavioral finance, corporate finance, emerging markets and regulation of financial markets, private equity and venture capital. Her work has been published in such journals as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and Science. She has been featured in the Thompson Reuter's list of most influential scientific minds in 2014, 2015 and 2016. Professor Sapienza has been an associate editor at the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Management Science, and the Journal of Finance. She was elected director of the American Finance Association in 2011 for a three-year term. She serves on the board of the Academic Female Finance Committee (AFFECT) of the American Finance Association.

She received a bachelor's degree in economics from Bocconi University, and an M.A. and PhD in economics from Harvard University.

Professor Sapienza is an independent board member of Assicurazioni Generali S.p.A., a publicly listed insurer, since April 2010. She is also a member of the investment and strategic committee and the related party transaction committee of Assicurazioni Generali.

Nicole Stephens' Portrait

Nicole Stephens

Associate Professor of Management & Organizations
Associate Professor of Psychology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences (by courtesy), Northwestern University

Nicole M. Stephens is an associate professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. She received her PhD in social psychology from Stanford University and her B.A. from Williams College. As a social and cultural psychologist, her research explores the ways in which the social world systematically influences how people understand themselves and their actions. Her specific focus is on how social class, race, ethnicity and gender shape people's everyday life experiences as well as important life outcomes such as educational attainment and health.

One line of Professor Stephens' research examines how experiences in different social class environments affect the ways in which people understand the choices that they make in their daily lives. Another line of research investigates how first-generation college students, from diverse cultural backgrounds, adjust in response to the mainstream culture of higher education. Together her research illuminates how seemingly neutral assumptions about what it means to be a "good," "normal" or "educated" person reflect the culturally specific perspectives of majority groups in society, and thereby contribute to social inequality. The underlying goal of this research is to develop more diverse and effective schools, workplaces and communities.

Professor Stephens is a member of various interdisciplinary working groups that strive to achieve this goal: The Bias Interrupters Working Group, which seeks to reduce bias against women and racial minorities in the workplace; the Harvard Higher Education Leaders Forum, which seeks to solve problems in higher education through evidence-based solutions; and The Mindset Scholars Network, which seeks to expand educational opportunity through the science of psychological intervention.

Professor Stephens' work is published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Psychological Science. In recognition of her work, Professor Stephens has been awarded the Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Award, as well as the the APA Award for Early Career Contribution to Social Psychology and the Louise Kidder Early Career Award.