Advisory Board

The advisory board for the Center for Global Business serves to provide guidance and counsel to the center in our strategic functions and outreach with the business, government, and thought leadership communities.

Members

Phil Grove, MBA ’15
Director of Business Development
Ellicott Dredge Enterprises, LLC

Philip Grove holds a BS in international business from Towson University and an MBA from the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. Grove has more than 18 years of experience in international business where he has worked extensively in market entry strategy, sales, logistics, and export compliance. While focusing on exporting US-made goods, he has traveled to over 30 countries and cultivated relationships with individuals across the globe. His experiences extend from Western Canada to Southeast Asia, and include working with public, private, and government agencies. At Ellicott, he oversees market analysis, identifies new business opportunities globally, and manages government relations across the company. He is the Past Chair of the Maryland/DC District Export Council (DEC) and sits on the advisory board for the Center for Global Business at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School.

Anil Gupta
Michael Dingman Chair in Global Strategy & Entrepreneurship
Smith School of Business

Anil K. Gupta is the Michael D. Dingman Chair in Strategy, Globalization and Entrepreneurship and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the Smith School of Business, The University of Maryland at College Park. Gupta also serves as chairman for The China India Institute, a Washington DC-based research and consulting organization. He is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, China and Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and has earlier served as a chaired professor in strategy at INSEAD and a visiting professor at Stanford University and Dartmouth College. He received a doctorate from the Harvard Business School, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, and a BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur. As one of the world's leading experts on strategy, globalization and entrepreneurship, Gupta serves regularly as a speaker at major conferences and corporate forums in the US, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa – including the World Economic Forum, economist conferences, Chief Executive magazine's CEO2CEO summits, and the Yale CEO Summit.

Larry Legates, MBA ’04
Director, Global Export Controls
Cummins Inc.

Larry Legates holds a Bachelor’s from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and an MBA in international supply chain management from the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. He is currently the Director of Global Export Controls at Cummins Inc., where he oversees export controls and sanctions activities for the $24 billion power solutions company. In this role, he leads a global and diverse team that drives export compliance practices for Cummins in various sectors, including transportation, agriculture, marine, construction, mining, and power generation.

Chris Light ’93
CEO and Co-Founder
E-Livestock Global

Chris Light is an executive, serial entrepreneur, technologist, innovator, Web3 and blockchain enthusiast with more than 25 years of experience. He is a co-founder at E-Livestock Global, a blockchain-powered, award-winning and globally acknowledged solution.

Launched worldwide from Zimbabwe, E-Livestock Global is a healthy livestock traceability social enterprise focused on digital and financial inclusion for smallholder farmers. Officially launched in 2021, it has received global press coverage, including The Economist, and has been televised. It also won Best Blockchain Solution in Africa (Digital Banker Africa) that same year.

His work with blockchain, supply and value chains has been featured by both MIT and the LSE. He won the Innovation Award at the 2022 SID-US annual conference for the E-Livestock traceability solution. He also put Zimbabwe at the top of the search results for livestock and blockchain. He was appointed as a country ambassador in 2023 for the Global Blockchain Business Council.

Robert Orr
Dean
School of Public Policy

Robert C. Orr serves as UMD School of Public Policy dean, United Nations under secretary-general, and special advisor to the UN secretary-general on climate change. He is also past president and current executive committee member of NASPAA, the global association of public policy, affairs and administration schools. Before joining the University of Maryland, Orr served as the assistant secretary-general for strategic planning in the Executive Office of the United Nations secretary-general from 2004 to 2014 and was the principal advisor to the secretary-general on counter-terrorism, peacebuilding, women's and children's health, sustainable energy, food and nutrition, institutional innovation, public-private partnership and climate change. Orr joined the United Nations from Harvard University, where he served as the executive director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government. Before this, he served as director of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC. He has served in senior posts in the government of the United States, including deputy to the United States ambassador to the United Nations and director of global affairs at the National Security Council, where he was responsible for peacekeeping and humanitarian affairs. He is also fluent in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.

Rashida Petersen ’03
Founder and CEO
1847 Philanthropic

Rashida Petersen holds a BS in international business from the University of Maryland‘s, Robert H. Smith School of Business. She is the CEO and founder of 1847 Philanthropic. Petersen's career has been built on expertise gained from leading major fundraising and development initiatives in Africa as well as expanding U.S. trade and investment in developing countries. Working within the development departments of international nonprofits, she has been responsible for annual funding goals of over $16 million in restricted institutional funding and over $1.3 million in cumulative unrestricted sponsorship dollars.

Erik Peterson
Partner and Managing Director, Global Business Policy Council
A.T. Kearney

As managing director of Kearney's Global Business Policy Council, Erik Peterson stands at the intersection of business and policy. Peterson came to Kearney in 2010 from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he was senior vice president and held the CSIS William Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis. While at CSIS he also established and led the Global Strategy Institute, a unit at CSIS focusing on strategic foresight issues. Before joining CSIS, Peterson was director of research at Kissinger Associates. Peterson is a sought-after analyst and speaker on global foresight and trends. He has lectured widely — in 50+ countries and before groups as diverse as the World Economic Forum to TED — on shifts in the global business operating environment. In addition, he is the author of numerous publications.

Ellen Polansky ’87
Financial Services Senior Executive and Coordinating Partner
EY

Ellen Polansky holds a BS in finance from the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business, a certificate in international management from Northwestern University, and participated in the Executive Leadership program at Harvard University. She is an internationally respected senior executive and philanthropist specializing in business development and growth strategy across multiple markets. A noted thought leader, Polansky has the proven ability to effectively develop winning business strategies that secure expansion, diversification, and closer client engagement for companies on a global scale. A powerful motivational and keynote speaker, and a high-performance team builder with an unmatched record of client success, Polansky's capabilities have been well evidenced in her current role with Ernst & Young, where she was appointed to coordinate client relationships and spearhead global cross-divisional teams with innovative go-to-market strategies across finance, accounting, tax, technology, risk and compliance.

Sammy Popat, ’15 and ’02
Innovation & Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Catalyst
Innovation Gateway, University of Maryland

Sammy Popat holds two bachelor's degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a master’s in professional studies in technology entrepreneurship. In Popat’s current position, he serves the campus and broader community in a variety of roles focused on empowering and enhancing the university's innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. His professional experiences range from co-facilitating graduate courses on design leadership at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and working for the Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, supporting the NSF's I-Corps program, to raising philanthropic funds for non-profits and running his own ventures.

Scott Samels ’92
Global Delivery Lead - Order to Cash
McCormick & Company

Scott Samels obtained his undergraduate degree in accounting from the University of Maryland's Smith School in 1992 and his MBA from Loyola University Maryland in 1999. He obtained his CPA license shortly after starting his professional career with KPMG in Baltimore, Maryland where he worked for approximately three years. After leaving KPMG he worked for PHH Corporation (now Element Fleet Management) for five years where he led teams in their financial accounting and financial operations departments. Samels currently works at McCormick & Company, Inc., a global leader in the flavor industry, where he has spent the past 20 years in a variety of finance and accounting positions in their business transformation, corporate controllership, U.S. consumer, and U.S. flavor solutions departments. For the past two and a half years he has served as the global delivery lead for the order-to-cash team and is responsible for leading a team of approximately 200 individuals based in the U.S., Canada and Poland. These teams are responsible for providing various services to McCormick's business units in North America and Europe, Middle East, and Africa regions.

Mary Ellen Scullen
Director of the School of Languages, Literature, and Cultures 
Associate Professor of French

Mary Ellen Scullen received a joint Ph.D. in French and Theoretical Linguistics from Indiana University in 1993 and holds a Maîtrise de français langue étrangère from l'Université François Rabelais in Tours, France. Before joining the University of Maryland, she taught at the University of Louisville and at Chancellor College, University of Malawi in Southern Africa. Her research interests include French linguistics, second language acquisition and pedagogy, and theoretical phonology. She is the author of French Prosodic Morphology: A Unified Account (IULC Publications, 1997) and a number of book chapters and articles. She has also published a number of editions of French textbooks since 2002 with Cathy Pons and Albert Valdman: Chez Nous: Branché sur le monde francophone, published by Pearson and currently in the Media Enhanced 4th edition and Points de départ, also with Pearson and currently in 2nd edition. She is the founding Director of SLLC's Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL). Her recent research has focused on technological mediated innovations in language learning and teaching, such as flipped, blended, hybrid, and online courses.

Chris Steadley, MBA ’12
Director, Global Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Chris Steadley is a visionary, purpose-driven leader with a passion for social impact and change. He brings more than 25 years of experience in leading and developing top-performing teams, building capabilities that increase and sustain performance, and collaborating to address complex problems. Steadley has worked for and achieved success at some of the world’s most successful and recognized brands (Ingersoll Rand, Oracle, Deloitte, PwC, Gartner). He is also a dedicated servant, demonstrated through his time with the Peace Corps, board leadership roles for Youth Guidance and Ingenuity, and as a Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow. Steadley studied management science at Virginia Tech, systems engineering at George Washington University, and marketing and international business at the Smith School, where he also studied abroad in Germany and France. Currently, Steadley is the Director of Global Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he focuses on helping the foundation become more diverse, equitable and inclusive so that more people around the world have the chance to live healthy and productive lives.

Margo Thomas, MFin ’90, PhD
President
Women's Economic Imperative

Throughout her career spanning more than two decades as a senior official at the world's premier development organization – the World Bank Group, Margo Thomas has provided policy advice to over 50 national and sub-national governments. With a doctoral degree in public policy and private sector development, her areas of focus include trade and competitiveness, women's economic empowerment, business environment reform, regulatory reform, and investment policy. In April 2017, Thomas successfully completed her appointment as the chief of the secretariat for the United Nations secretary-general's high-level panel on women's economic empowerment. Under the Argentinian presidency of the G20, Thomas was appointed co-chair of the 2018 Think 20 Task Force on Gender Economic Equity. Subsequently, Thomas was invited by the Japanese presidency to continue her work and serve as a co-chair of the 2019 Think 20 Task Force on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In her ongoing role as founder and CEO of Women's Economic Imperative, Thomas serves as a catalyst for initiatives aimed at increasing opportunities for the economic empowerment of disadvantaged and under-represented groups globally.

Robin Wiener
Managing Director, Enterprise Data Solutions
Dedalus, North America

Robin Wiener is a nationally recognized leader and change agent in healthcare IT and patient engagement. She brings more than 20 years of experience in business development, management and product strategy to her position as Managing Director, Enterprise Data Solutions at Dedalus, North America. She is part of the team that is bringing Dedalus to North America. Dedalus is one of the Top 5 Global healthcare companies in the world.

Before starting at Dedalus, Robin was the President and founding partner of Get Real Health. Wiener led business development and marketing efforts for Get Real Health, leveraging her outstanding people skills and a large network of contacts to identify opportunities and close sales. She built the company’s growing list of strategic partnerships around the world. Wiener has an innate knack for identifying the skill sets integral to a successful team. Robin led business development, marketing and partnerships for Get Real Health since its inception in 2002, leveraging her outstanding people skills and a large network of contacts to identify opportunities and close sales. In 2019, Robin led the effort for Get Real Health to be acquired by CPSI in a multi-million-dollar deal.

Ex-Officio Members