Meet the Team

PramoDita Sharma (Co-Founder)

University of Vermont Professor

PramoDITA Sharma is the Schlesinger-Grossman Chair of Family Business at the Grossman School of Business, University of Vermont. She is a visiting scholar at the Family Business Centers at Kellogg School of Management, USA and Indian School of Business, India, and is an advisory board member of the Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), Sweden. Dita served as the editor of Family Business Review from 2008-2017. Her research on succession, governance, innovation, next generation commitment, entrepreneurial leadership and sustainability in/by family enterprises is published in over fifty articles and ten books. Pioneering Business Families of Sustainable Development is her most recent book.

Jim Davis (Co-Founder)

Utah State University Professor

James H. Davis is the Buehler Endowed Professor of Management, Chairman of the Marketing and Strategy Department and director of Executive Education in the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. Prior to Utah State he was the John F. O’Shaughnessy Professor of Family Enterprises and a Professor of Strategic Management in the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame for over twenty-five years beginning in 1991. He has worked with many major national and multinational corporations and family businesses throughout the world on strategic planning and positioning. His research interests and publications are in the areas of corporate governance, strategic decision-making, trust, and strategic alliances.

Ana Gonzalez (Co-Founder)

Grand Valley State University Director Of Family-Owned Business Institute

Besides being the Director of the Family Owned Business Institute, Ana Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor of Management at the Seidman College of Business, Grand Valley State University. Ana holds a Ph.D. in Management from Tulane University, has M.Sc. in Economics, and a Bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering from Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia.

Her research interests include entrepreneurship, corporate governance, and sustainability in family businesses. Throughout her career, Ana has been a scholar, advocate, consultant, and supporter of family enterprises. She is a board member of the STEP Project Global Consortium a global research initiative on transgenerational entrepreneurship, created in 2005 to conduct and disseminate knowledge in the family business field, and a board member at the West Michigan Family Business Alliance.

Mark Green (Co-Founder)

Pacific Family Business Institute Consultant And Faculty Member

Mark T. Green is a family business consultant, speaker, author, educator, and researcher. Mark is a co-founder of the Pacific Family Business Institute and leads his own family business consulting firm. He consults on family business issues such as succession, governance, strategy, conflict resolution, and leadership. Previously, Mark was a principal with the Family Business Consulting Group based in Chicago the A.E. Coleman Chair in Family Business, and the Director of the Austin Family Business Program at Oregon State University. He co-founded the Family Enterprise Research Conference (FERC) in 2005 and served as chair of the Educator and Research Conference for the Family Firm Institute. Mark authored Inside the Multi-Generational Family Business, published by Palgrave Macmillan, and has authored or co-authored more than 20 academic journals, book chapters, and book reviews.

Matt Allen

Northwestern University

Dr. Matt Allen is the John L. Ward Clinical Professor of Family Enterprises and Executive Director of the Ward Center for Family Enterprises. His expertise is in the area of family learning, family entrepreneurship, and the development of the next generation. Professor Allen has taught entrepreneurship and family entrepreneurship courses for the undergraduate, graduate, and executive. At the executive level, Professor Allen has worked with audiences across the globe with a special interest in Middle Eastern, Asian and Latin American markets. Fluent in Spanish, Professor Allen is comfortable teaching in both English and Spanish. As a youth and young adult after college, Professor Allen worked for his own family's business so the issues family businesses face are personal and relevant to him. His research addresses how families learn, how to prepare the next generation for their individual roles in the family business, and how family members can be more entrepreneurial individually and as a family. This research is creating a fundamental shift in our understanding of how families learn and how business families are taught in university and executive programs. Professor Allen is a leader in the field of family entrepreneurship and his research has been published in top academic and practitioner outlets including the Harvard Business Review, Personnel Psychology and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. In addition, he has played a significant role both at Babson and in the broader academic family business community. He was the founding Faculty Director of the Institute for Family Entrepreneurship at Babson College and the Academic Director of the Global STEP Project for four years.

Professor Allen is active as a consultant to family businesses around the world and in addition to his independent consulting work has done work in partnership with various global family business consultancies. In addition to the experience gained working for his family's business, he worked as a financial analyst at both IBM and Hewlett Packard before entering academia. Professor Allen earned his B.A. in accounting from the University of Utah, M.B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and Ph.D. from Cornell University.

Gaia Marchisio

Colombia University

Gaia Marchisio is the Founder and Managing Partner of CARE For Family Enterprise. Gaia and her colleagues believe that an interdisciplinary advisor team can adequately capture and address family enterprise complexity. Building a bench of experts with high competence and emotional intelligence, trained to understand and manage systems, the team collaborates closely to tailor sustainable processes to impact them genuinely and positively around the globe. A discerning facilitator, renowned educator, esteemed speaker, innovative researcher, author, and compassionate and caring resource, Gaia is a force of positivity for family enterprises and their advisors. Currently, she has an appointment as Adjunct Associate Professor of Management at Columbia Business School. As a native of Milan, Italy, and a naturalized US citizen, fluent in English, Spanish and Italian, Gaia has a strong passion for understanding, respecting, and interacting in different cultures.