The fall 2024 semester kicks off with a burst of renewed energy as students, staff, and faculty welcome a fresh group of faculty members to the Commerce School.
McIntire’s newest members come to Grounds on the strength of their impactful work and insightful research. Their skills and dedication stand to be instrumental in fostering the tradition of academic excellence and scholarship across the School’s wealth of programs, elevating and enhancing the unparalleled student learning experience. As the Commerce School continues to refine and expand its exceptional business education, these new community members are undertaking important work and preparing students to leverage the potential of commerce in many areas.
Elaine Costa, Assistant Professor of Commerce, General Faculty
Before coming to McIntire, Professor Costa developed and taught courses in Business Management and Human Resources Management at the University of Utah and Toronto Metropolitan University. She holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior (Management) from the University of Utah, and an MIRHR, Master of Industrial Relations and Human Resources, from the University of Toronto.
Costa’s research has centered on understanding how individuals form judgments in organizations and the impact of those decisions on workplace diversity and discriminatory behavior. Informed by these insights, she has also investigated ways to enhance decision-making processes, with the goal of achieving more equitable workplace outcomes. An expert in the areas of management, diversity, judgment, and decision-making, she has published work in Journal of Applied Psychology; Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes; Collabra: Psychology; and Harvard Business Review.
Before her academic roles, Costa held strategic and analytical positions in the technology and aerospace industries, as well as co-founded and led an e-commerce venture.
David P. Costanza, Professor of Commerce, General Faculty
Professor Costanza teaches Foundations of Commerce at McIntire, as well as additional upper-division elective courses. Before coming to the Commerce School, he served as a Department Chair and Director of the Industrial/Organizational Psychology Ph.D. Program at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. His research focuses on generational differences; adaptive and high-potential leadership; organizational culture, decline, and death; as well as statistics and research methods.
Costanza has published in Journal of Business and Psychology; Journal of Vocational Behavior; Personnel Psychology; and Work, Aging and Retirement. He has authored for Slate and has been interviewed by The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, TIME magazine, VOX, and Yahoo! Finance. He is a member of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Academy of Management, serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Business and Psychology and Work, Aging and Retirement, and is also a Senior Consortium Fellow for the U.S. Army Research Institute, offering technical and scientific advice to military researchers and practitioners.
He has received the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s Distinguished Teaching Contributions Award, the Distinguished Alumni Award in I/O Psychology from George Mason University, and the Robert W. Kenny Prize for Innovation in Teaching of Introductory Courses from the Columbian College at The George Washington University.
Yuxiang Du, Assistant Professor of Commerce
Professor Du specializes in strategic, organizational, and intercultural communication, as well as public diplomacy. With over 10 years of college teaching experience, Du utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to foster a supportive and engaging learning environment, emphasizing ethical and effective communication tailored to audience, purpose, and context.
Prior to joining McIntire, Du taught at Baylor University in Waco, TX, and Fort Hays State University in Hays, KS, where he developed and taught various business and organizational communication courses. Outside of the classroom, his research focuses on promoting inclusive organizational identity and intercultural competence, with publications in various academic journals and presentations at national conferences. He is dedicated to preparing students to excel in a globalized world through innovative teaching methods and practical, real-world applications.
He holds a Ph.D. in Strategic Communication from George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, and an M.A. in Interpersonal and Organizational Communication from Lynchburg, VA’s Liberty University, as well as a B.A. in Teaching Chinese as Foreign Language from Beijing Language and Culture University.
Harry A. Franks Jr., Lecturer of Commerce, General Faculty
Professor Franks joins McIntire after teaching at UVA’s School of Law for six years, where he earned his J.D. and led courses in Financial Accounting, Corporate Finance, Mergers and Acquisitions, and Business Planning. At the Commerce School, where he earned his M.S. in Accounting (Tax) and his B.S. in Commerce (Accounting), he brings his wealth of experience to teach courses in Federal Taxation and Tax Research.
He began teaching after retiring from Baker Hughes, a General Electric company, in January 2018 upon completing the successful merger of Baker Hughes and GE’s oil and gas businesses. He had first joined Baker Hughes, an oilfield services company with operations in more than 80 countries, in August 2012, where he led the tax planning group; his responsibilities included mergers and acquisitions, cash repatriation, foreign tax credit planning, supply chain planning, and transfer pricing.
With 30 years working with large multinational companies to solve tax issues and serving as a Principal with Ernst & Young in their international tax services group in Dallas, TX, and New York City, preceded by Vice President of Global Taxes with multinational chemical company Celanese, and earlier as Partner at the law firm of Baker & McKenzie in Washington, DC, Franks served a number of Fortune 500 clients in a wide range of international tax matters. His in-house experience also includes over five years with General Electric as both international tax counsel and European tax counsel.
Franks’ areas of subject expertise include income taxation, international taxation, mergers & acquisitions, and legal entity structuring.
Gretchen Gamrat, Assistant Professor of Commerce, General Faculty
Joining McIntire’s Finance Area, Professor Gamrat comes to the School from the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business, where she earned her Ph.D. in Finance. While there, she also served as the instructor in courses Creating Value through Capital and Financial Management, the latter of which she teaches at McIntire at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In 2017, she earned her M.Sc. in Finance, with a concentration in Financial and Risk Management, as well as her B.B.A. in Finance from Hofstra University’s Zarb School of Business.
With expertise in empirical corporate finance and product market competition, Gamrat’s research interests have resulted in papers on competition and diversification and firm resilience based on retail scanner data during times of crisis, as well as co-authored work on the impact of video games on violent crime.
She received the Robin & Roger Best Teaching Award in 2022 and earned the Hopewell-Racette Research Scholarship in 2020.
Brian Healy, Lecturer of Commerce, and Associate Director of the Center for Investments & Financial Markets
A McIntire alumnus who earned his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, Professor Healy joins the Commerce School after more than 25 years in the investment banking industry. His expertise in that field, along with extensive knowledge in finance, corporate governance, and mergers & acquisitions, stems from his work advising senior management teams and boards of directors at public and private companies on numerous strategic transactions, including acquisitions, divestitures, spin-offs, corporate carve-outs, unsolicited proposals, hostile defenses, activist investor defense, special committee assignments, and cross-border transactions.
In his professional life, Healy was part of Lehman Brothers, before departing for Morgan Stanley’s Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) department in 2000, where he served as a Managing Director who led group in the Americas and was a member of the Investment Banking Division’s (IBD) Management Committee. In addition to his experience in M&A, he was the global Chief Operating Officer for IBD and led Morgan Stanley’s Strategy and Business Development function.
A member of the board of directors of Mueller Water products and of the board of Children’s Aid and Family Services of New Jersey, Healy will serve as Associate Director for McIntire’s Center for Investors & Financial Markets, which aims to promote understanding about the investor community, as well as the performance and structure of financial markets through collaborative relationships among faculty, students, finance professionals, and policymakers.
Larry Murphy, Lecturer of Commerce, General Faculty
Professor Murphy brings his extensive professional experience and more than 25 years of progressive expertise in finance, organizational leadership, talent management, and executive education to courses in the General Business Minor.
A McIntire alumnus, Murphy initially pursued a career in investment banking, serving in client advisory roles and later as Managing Director/Chief Operating Officer (IBD) at Morgan Stanley in Europe. He also served in a similar management role on a global level at UBS Securities. While he started and ended his banking career in New York, he spent more than a decade in London and Frankfurt.
In addition to a career in banking, Murphy has significant experience in higher education and organizational talent development. He served in multiple roles over a decade at Harvard Business School, including as Director, MBA Program Administration, and Managing Director/Head of Custom Programs (HBS Executive Education). Following this, he was Director of Partner Learning and Development at McKinsey & Company, responsible for the learning and growth of the global partnership, before assuming a role at UVA’s Darden School Foundation as President and Chief Operating of Officer of Executive Education and Lifelong Learning. Murphy left Darden in 2022 and since then has been (and continues to be) active as a consultant to both educational institutions and professional service firms on a wide variety of topics.
