“What excites me most about the Master of Science in Management program is the inevitable knowledge collision between the HWS liberal arts core and the ‘traditional’ managerial skills of business,” Bizari says. “Technology minded management has dominated business in the U.S. over the past several decades; an HWS master’s in management, based on a strong liberal arts foundation, will increase the quality and quantity of graduates who are willing to make conscious, impactful, and socially minded decisions in the traditional business setting.”
Bizari is an entrepreneur based in Rochester, N.Y. with 30+ years experience at Fortune 500 companies, funded startups, and early stage startup companies. Areas of expertise included strategy development, product management, sales, and marketing. At HWS, Bizari plays a vital role in developing the Colleges’ entrepreneurial programming, advising students and supporting their projects, directing the Summer Sandbox Student Startup Accelerator, facilitating workshops and coordinating entrepreneurial events on and off campus.
Since 2013 he has been with Launch NY, an Upstate NY venture development firm that advises and funds early stage startup companies, serves on several startup boards, is a National Science Foundations I-Corps Short Course instructor, has taught entrepreneurship courses at University of Rochester and Ithaca College, and serves as a mentor in regional clean energy and food/agriculture economic development competitions. Ed holds an MBA and BSEE from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Tom Drennen
Professor of Economics, Director of the Master of Science in Management Program and The Stine Family Endowed Chair in Management and Entrepreneurship
Professor Drennen never took an economics course as an undergraduate, but the more he studied climate change, the more he understood that the best solutions would have to transcend engineering and science. Politics, history, international relations, sociology, economics — understanding how they all connect determines the most viable path forward.
The MSM program at HWS proceeds from the same idea: “empowering students to dive deep into serious, complex, interrelated issues and find solutions,” Drennen says. “Because technology will change in unrecognizable ways during their careers, we also want students to have meaningful leadership experience, foundational skills in finance and communications, and a practical understanding of how organizations adapt and evolve over time.”
An expert in energy use and climate change, Drennen has served as a senior economist for Sandia National Laboratories, where he developed techno-economic models examining the economic and environmental tradeoffs of alternative energy pathways, including alternative fuels such as ethanol and hydrogen. The author of Pathways to a Hydrogen Future, Drennen earned a Ph.D. in resource economics from Cornell University, an M.A. in public policy from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor of Science in nuclear engineering from MIT. He is the recipient of the 2018 Senior Fellow Award from the United States Association for Energy Economics and the 2006 Faculty Award for Teaching from HWS.
Amy Forbes
Director of the Centennial Center | Director, Master's in Higher Education Leadership Program
At the forefront of leadership education, Amy Forbes’ courses blend contemporary leadership theory and cutting-edge innovation concepts. In her classroom, students prepare to lead diverse teams, cultivate inclusive and innovative cultures, and tackle significant challenges in organizational environments.
A practitioner of the Adaptive Leadership framework, an emerging model designed by faculty at Harvard University, Forbes says, “With increasing complexities and rapidly changing environments, this framework is useful toward helping leaders differentiate between technical and adaptive challenges, to diagnose the system, and see where they can leverage innovative solutions that might otherwise not be possible.”
As the director of the Centennial Center, Forbes teaches courses, facilitates sessions, advises students, develops content and builds programming that transforms students into change agents. She holds a doctorate with a focus in educational leadership and policy studies from the University of Vermont. “Leadership as a field spoke to me largely because it plays host to so many interesting disciplines and it truly is where the action takes place,” she says. “I like the challenge of pursuing a craft where there’s no mastery, only continuous, lifelong learning to be the best version of yourself when you are an organizational leader.”
Forbes has presented on numerous topics including authentic leadership, ethical decision-making, group dynamics, organizational change, problem solving and innovation. Her areas of interest are leadership studies, leadership development, college student leadership, organizational development, and entrepreneurial leadership.
T. ALden Gassert
Interim Director of Institutional Research
T. Alden Gassert, who holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Massachusetts and a B.A. from Bowdoin College, serves as the Director of Institutional Research at HWS. He has served as a visiting assistant professor in the HWS Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and previously at Western New England University and University of Colorado, Boulder. His primary research interests are Number Theory and Arithmetic Dynamics.
Jack Harris P’02, P’06
Professor of Sociology
“Social entrepreneurship looks at creating business entities that are based on community assets and are sustainable in the long run. These approaches require thinking through problems, design, human relations — there is no formula that works in the varied situations within which we find ourselves,” Professor Harris says.
That’s why the M.S.M. program offers students an experiential, solutions-oriented curriculum, with opportunities “to map out a situation 360 degrees, to focus on what is central and what is peripheral, understand and interpret it well, and to act effectively,” explains Harris.
For decades, Harris has studied the impacts of stress, inertia and change within large corporations and organizations. As an applied sociologist, he consults with local governments across the United States on business process reengineering, change management and municipal information technology. His research also explores men and masculinity in Vietnam and the experience of Vietnamese as they navigate massive economic and social change. Among his many academic experiences abroad, Harris has served as the core director of World Regional Geography for the Semester at Sea Program, director of the social entrepreneurship programs through ThinkImpact in Panama and Ghana, and director of several HWS global education programs. A 2017-18 Kinghorn Fellow, he earned his doctoral and master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. from Tulane University.
Beth Kinne
Associate Professor of Environmental Studies
The M.S.M. program builds “on the strengths of a liberal arts education that is so central to HWS’ mission,” says Professor Kinne. “Students who come through our undergraduate majors are skilled in identifying important questions to ask and figuring out how to go about answering them in a way that is intellectually sound. The M.S.M. will give students additional pragmatic tools to further their engagement and competence in creating responses to the problems and needs they identify.”
Before she joined the HWS faculty in 2008, Kinne was a water rights attorney and municipal attorney in the state of Colorado. She now studies state and local law, with a particular focus on natural resource management, especially water and natural gas. In her graduate-level courses on business law and navigating conflict, students will develop foundational knowledge in legal concepts and reasoning, and examine how conflict and conflict mitigation unfolds in different cultural contexts.
Kinne, who also teaches a range of undergraduate courses focused on the environment and the law, earned a B.A. in biology from the University of Virginia; M.S. in resource management and environmental studies from the University of British Columbia; and J.D. and LL.M. in Asian and comparative law from the University of Washington. She holds the Finger Lakes Institute Endowed Chair in Environmental Studies, which supports her work to increase collaboration between the FLI and HWS students and faculty more broadly.
Robinson Murphy
Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies
The HWS M.S.M. program is grounded in an intellectual community that values ethical reasoning and decision-making, Robinson Murphy says. In his “Management Strategies for a Changing World” course, which Murphy co-teaches alongside Professor of Economics Thomas Drennen, students engage with topics at the intersection of economics, environmental ethics and critical race studies.
“Time and time again, I watch our students grow into impressive critical thinkers and experimental, fearless doers. I marvel at our students all the time. If anyone has it in them to love the world into being something better than it is, it’s them—I believe that. Our students are willing to get their hands dirty. They have both the brains and the brawn.”
With a background in the humanities, having earned his Ph.D. in literature from the University of Notre Dame, and expertise in environmental education, Murphy incorporates mixed media into his teaching, enlivening discussions about theory with film and art alongside print texts. In addition to teaching in the Environmental Studies Department, Murphy’s courses have been cross-listed in the Gender Studies Program. He also served as a Faculty Research Fellow in the Fisher Center for the Study of Gender and Justice.
Craig Talmage
Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies
With a core research interest in the darker and grayer sides of entrepreneurship, Craig Talmage’s scholarship looks beyond traditional enterprise, often bringing seedier characters – from hacktivists to pirates – into his case studies. “I challenge students, scholars and practitioners to expand their perspectives on who is the entrepreneur, what is entrepreneurship, and what constitutes entrepreneurial success and failure,” Talmage says.
In his own journey through higher education, Talmage pivoted away from a traditional business school to join an interdisciplinary master’s program where he could apply industrial/organizational psychology to understand nonprofit and for-profit workplaces. He earned his Ph.D. in Community Resources and Development at Arizona State University and now teaches courses in local development, tourism development, organizational behavior/development, nonprofit management and leadership, and social entrepreneurship.
Talmage has more than ten years of combined not-for-profit, nonprofit and public sector research and leadership experience. Before becoming an educator, he founded and operated a research consulting practice for small businesses and nonprofits in Arizona. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of Community Development. At HWS, he serves as the faculty liaison for the Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning.
