Current Advisors

Dr. Moronke Oke is the Chair of Management and a Full Professor of Organizational Behavior and Management. Her professional experience includes working in various banking positions in Africa and as an associate HR consultant in the UK. Her areas of research are inter-organizational dynamics and inter-firm networking.

Dr. Oke has presented at various management conferences in both the U.S. and across Europe, and she has published articles in peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Change Management and Journal of Operations Management. In addition, Dr. Oke has authored a practitioner paper for The Intelligent Transport Systems in the UK and has presented to government agencies in both the UK and the USA.

With over 20 years of teaching experience at the undergraduate and graduate level, Dr. Oke taught Organizational Behavior, Management, and Human Resource Management in the UK, and she has continued to teach those courses at GCU in the traditional ground modality as well as online. Dr. Oke has taught in the Master of Science in Leadership Program, the Doctorate program at GCU as well as in the Executive MBA Program. She currently teaches and develops curriculum for the traditional MBA Program and undergraduate programs in the College of Business. As a full Professor of Organizational Behavior and Management and Chair of the Management department at GCU, Dr. Oke has oversight of the BS (Management) Degree and the Applied Management program. She sits on the Research Faculty Advisory Board, and she is the advisor of the Eta Chi Chapter of Delta Mu Delta Honors Society. She served as an associate editor of CJIS and sat on several university committees including the Institutional Review Board, One Foundation, and the Graduate Council.

Dr. Oke earned her MBA (with Distinction), Post-graduate Diploma in Research Methods, and Ph.D. from Cardiff Business School in the UK, a top research school belonging to the Ivy League of the UK. Cardiff Business School is also AACSB accredited and is one of the leading Universities on the UK. Dr. Oke's dissertation title was “Collaboration between firms in inter-organizational networks in the UK: An analysis of key factors.

Dr. Praveena Jayaraman is an assistant professor of economics at the Colangelo College of Business at Grand Canyon University. She came to the US from India to pursue her graduate education and earned a PhD in Natural Resource Economics in 2014 from West Virginia University. She currently teaches Intermediate Micro and Macroeconomic courses as well as Business Statistics, Managerial Economics, and Quantitative Methods for MBA students. Her research interests include regional economics, labor economics, and higher education.

Merri L. Pedersen, Ed.D. is faculty in the Colangelo College of Business at Grand Canyon University. She has twenty years of corporate leadership experience and has been teaching traditional students for the last six years at Grand Canyon University. Dr. Pedersen earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Management and Science, her Master of Science degree in Organizational Leadership, and a doctoral degree in Organizational Leadership with emphasis in Organizational Development. During her twenty years in the corporate world, Dr. Pedersen worked in the telecommunication industry as the Director of Software Engineering. She gained real-world experiences in leadership, including global leadership, through management of teams from various locations across the world. Dr. Pedersen’s passion and purpose is teaching the upcoming generation about Organizational Leadership and Global Business by combining her corporate experiences with academics to prepare students to be successful in the business world.

Dr. Connor Magnuson is currently a full-time economics professor in the Colangelo College of Business at Grand Canyon University. He received his undergraduate degree in Economics with a minor in Math and Political Science from the University of New Mexico and received graduate degree in economics from the University of Wyoming. His current research agenda is focused on gender discrimination in wage negotiations.

Dr. Alexander Theisen has served as a full-time faculty member at GCU for two years. A native of the valley, Alex earned his Bachelor’s degree in Economics at Arizona State University, before going on to receive his Master’s and PhD in Economics at Northwestern University, where his research used game theory to compare the effectiveness “hard” and “soft” incentives for enforcing agreements. Since finishing his doctorate, he lived in Rochester, NY before moving back to Arizona, where he currently lives with his wife Liz and his dog, Cowboy.