Dr. Beheruz N. Sethna is President Emeritus and Regents’ Professor of Marketing at Richards College of Business, University of West Georgia, USA. Dr. Sethna is a Distinguished Alumnus of the two most prestigious higher education institutions in India/Asia: IIT-Bombay and IIM-Ahmedabad. He holds an M.Phil and PhD from Columbia University, New York.
Among the several distinctions that he holds is that he is the first known person of Indian origin ever to become President of a University in America. He was the longest-serving University President in the State of Georgia (among both, public and private colleges and universities). He held the position of President at the University of West Georgia from 1994 to June 2013. During Dr. Sethna’s tenure as President, the institution saw transformative change from a College to a State University to a Ph.D.-granting SACS Level VI University (this is SACS’s highest level – e.g. the best private and public universities in the South are SACS Level VI, such as the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, U of Texas, U of Virginia, Emory, etc.). In August of 2013, the Board approved a sector change for UWG to a Comprehensive University with a mission to be a world-class academic institution. During Dr. Sethna’s tenure, UWG’s academic standards increased several times and full-time equivalent enrollment increased by approximately 50 percent to close to 12,000 students.
Dr. Sethna is a popular speaker with about 200 speeches to his credit. In addition to scores of speeches to service clubs such as Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, he has been the keynote speaker at several international and national conferences and meetings sponsored by various corporate and academic groups. He has also been the keynote speaker at two Naturalization Ceremonies sponsored by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service in which new U.S. Citizens are sworn in. He has also been the Commencement (graduation / convocation) speaker at U.S. colleges. The Education Policy Fellowship Program (EPFP) is a national professional development program sponsored by the Institute for Educational Leadership, which provides potential education leaders with the knowledge and networks to advance the core issues of education policy. Dr. Sethna was involved with the conception of the EPFP in Georgia and has been a major speaker in the program each year for well over a decade, as long as the Georgia program has been in existence. In April, 2016, he presented a TEDx Talk entitled, “An American Star” – that talk was published on the web on May 17, 2016. In June of 2018, he presented a talk to the Indian Merchants Chamber on Leadership. He has also been a featured speaker on Leadership-related topics at the American Council on Education programs for senior academic leaders across America, and has been a keynote speaker at the University of Oxford in England multiple times.
He has received personal Resolutions of Commendation from the Governor of the State of Georgia, the Senate, and the House of the State of Georgia, and from the State of Georgia Board of Regents, and was named among the 100 Most Influential Georgians six times.
Dr. Sethna has been personally honored by universities and University Presidents in China, Japan, Korea, Saudi Arabia, and countries in Europe; and also by Vice Chancellors and Board Chairs in India. Dr. Sethna has been an invited speaker at hundreds of meetings, and at universities in many U.S. states and foreign countries, including three times at the University of Oxford in England; he has also been the keynote speaker at various corporate forums.
He has been a Fulbright Professor and has taught at some of the most prestigious institutions in India and South Asia. He also taught a landmark program in computers in Nepal – taught to senior professionals from the national Government, Higher Education, and the corporate sector.
Dr. Sethna has also earned a large number of academic honors. Perhaps most distinctive is his record of being nationally recognized for instructional innovation by the Decision Sciences Institute eight times. (No other person in the history of this national competition has been so honored more than two times.) He also has an extensive record in the field of undergraduate research, briefly described on the following page.
He has coauthored a book, Research Methods in Marketing and Management. He has also published 75 papers, several case studies, and obtained externally funded research from the U.S. Department of Energy, IBM, AT&T and others.
Françoise Chevalier holds a PhD from HEC and the French “HDR” qualification as a supervisor of doctoral research. She is an associate professor in the Management and Human Resources department at HEC Paris. Françoise teaches Mastère, Doctorate and Executive Education courses. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.Her research concerns Managerial Innovation and Organizational Change, Leadership and Human Resources Management, Creativity and Pedagogy.Françoise was President of the panel awarding the FNEGE (Fondation Nationale pour l’Enseignement de la Gestion) prizes for the best doctoral dissertations in 2019 and 2020. She specializes in qualitative, comparative and longitudinal research methods, and several of the HEC PhD dissertations supervised by Françoise have won national and international prizes.
Prof. Pandey has a long association of service with AIT. He has served approved at the meeting of the Board of Trustees, AIT, on 22 November 2011. Earlier, he served as Visiting Professor, School of Management (SOM), AIT from September 1995 to September 1997 and Dean, School of Management, from November 2005 to December 2007 He served the prestigious Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad as a professor for about twenty-five years where he also held the position of Dean and Officiating Director. For short stints, he served in many institutes and universities in India and abroad. He has been on the boards of several companies.