During the spring 2026 semester, the Gabelli School of Business will launch a new applied consulting project for students in the Full-time MBA program, designed to deepen experiential learning while strengthening ties with alumni and industry partners. In the interview that follows, Sertan Kabadayi, PhD, Joseph Keating, SJ, Distinguished Professor in Business and program director of the Full-time and Professional MBA programs, elaborates on the origins of this new initiative, provides details on its structure, and focuses on the impact it will have on the education students receive.

Q: How did the idea for this consulting project come about?
A: In the past, the Full-time MBA program included consulting projects as part of the Global Immersion Program, but those engagements were short-term and tied to companies in the cities students were visiting. The client experience wasn’t ideal, and students didn’t always benefit in the long run. When I became program director, based upon my own observations and student feedback, I made the decision to separate consulting projects from the Global Immersion and create something more intentional and impactful.

The Gabelli School of Business recently launched the Fordham AI Business Hub (AIBH), a center for thought leadership that is dedicated to applied, responsible enterprise AI. Developed as part of Fordham University’s broader “AI for the Greater Good” initiative, the AIBH convenes industry leaders, academics, government and community partners, students, and alumni to explore practical applications of AI in business and workforce development, as well as critical issues related to ethical governance and responsible business.

The Fordham AIBH amplifies the Gabelli School’s mission of fostering responsible business leadership that inspires innovation, community, and impact, and is a critical facet of its five-year Strategic Plan. Its foundation is focused on four pillars: Workforce Development, Upskilling, and Reskilling; Innovation, Applied Research, and Startup Development; Community Engagement and Support for Small Businesses and Nonprofits; and Ethical AI Governance and Public-Sector Innovation—all of which will contribute directly to the NYC business ecosystem.

“Fordham’s AI Business Hub reflects the University’s and the School’s commitment to preparing students from the city and the world for the global workplace of the future and for a business environment that is being transformed overnight through the use of AI,” said Lerzan Aksoy, PhD, dean, George N. Jean PhD chair, and professor of marketing, Gabelli School of Business.

Since its October opening, Saxbys Fordham has become the Lincoln Center campus’s go-to spot for coffee, sandwiches, smoothies, and more. The high-performing retail establishment is staffed and managed completely by Fordham students.

The cafe’s original student CEO, Aidan Engelmann, an undergraduate global finance major in his senior year at the Gabelli School, was responsible for launching the business. “Our team members were phenomenal from the start. They lived out our core values,” he said. “We grew to become one of the highest-performing Saxbys, and no one really expected that of us in our inaugural semester.”

The Earthshot Prize, founded by Prince William, is arguably the world’s most prestigious environmental awards program, presenting five £1 million awards to changemakers each year. The winners are chosen from a carefully vetted selection of nominees put forth by distinguished nominating organizations around the globe, including Fordham London.

Fordham London earned a place as an official Earthshot nominating organization in 2024, joining an international network that includes NGOs, investment companies, foundations, and research institutions. Through this affiliation, Fordham students are directly involved in a high-profile process, identifying and presenting nominees for consideration.

“The Earthshot Prize takes global issues and looks at them from a solutions perspective. It’s an incredible opportunity for our students to be part of that impactful work,” said Matthew Holland, senior director of Fordham London. “It is a great way of centering their experience on shared global issues while giving them a local context of how the UK is responding to these challenges.”

For more than two decades, a unique collaboration between Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business and Jazz at Lincoln Center has used music to foster a creative and innovative way to approach leadership and teamwork.

The Syncopated Leadership workshop, developed by John Hollwitz, PhD, professor of psychology and rhetoric at the Gabelli School, draws a powerful parallel between the intertwining dynamics of blues and jazz ensembles and the way high-performing business teams operate. In both instances, success depends upon listening closely, adapting quickly, identifying team members’ strengths, and incorporating one another’s ideas to deliver a single, unified composition.

“About 20 years ago, we realized there were strong similarities between what happens in a really cohesive jazz or blues group and what happens in an effective business team,” Hollwitz explained.

“Especially teams that function without someone in charge, calling every shot step-by-step.”

Since 2014, the Gabelli School of Business has collaborated with Town+Gown: NYC, a city-wide research program in the built environment, resident at NYC’s Department of Design and Construction (DDC). Town+Gown provides opportunities for graduate students at New York schools to work on real NYC agency research needs. For Gabelli School graduate students, that has meant analyzing administrative data on public capital projects serving residents across the five boroughs and providing insights from the data.

This experiential learning opportunity was initially led by R.P. Raghupathi, PhD, and Aditya Saharia, PhD, professors at the Gabelli School. Students tackled numerous administrative data sets provided by city agencies, analyzing them to gain insights using data-driven methods. The project scopes varied with the data sets provided and students were able to build on prior projects’ insights to apply an array of analytical techniques. Student-led research within Town+Gown aims at providing research results that can help inform future policy and practice change. As the collaboration with Town+Gown has grown in scale, it also has served to strengthen the connection between the School and NYC government.

On the second Friday of every month, from September through May, the Gabelli School of Business Dean’s Conference Room at the Lincoln Center campus is transformed into a space for thought leadership sparked by some of the top minds in technology. The discussions are part of the “CIO Roundtable,” the brainchild of Aditya Saharia, PhD, professor of information systems and director of the School’s Center for Digital Transformation. Each session features a speaker from a different sector who focuses on grounding the group on breaking developments occurring in their industry. Talks are centered on new technologies and their applications, the accelerated pace of change occurring, and the ways companies and organizations are jumping—headfirst—into a revolution of historic proportion driven by the explosion of AI.

“The CIO Roundtable affords a setting in which those who are deeply involved in critical facets of technology as it relates to business, can together explore the rapidly evolving tech environment, deliberating the progress being made while understanding the social and ethical implications that come with it,” commented Saharia. “This year’s discussions have been particularly exciting as changes are happening in real time due to the lightning speed at which artificial intelligence is infiltrating everything we do. It is our goal to surface both the opportunities and obstacles that are arising and to provide the knowledge to take advantage of or to address them head on, while stimulating dialog that can lead to new breakthroughs.”

During the Gabelli School’s 2026 Graduate Diploma Ceremony on May 19, Jim Ziolkowski, founder and CEO of buildOn, will serve as the distinguished speaker, delivering an address to graduating students, their family members, and friends.

Inspired by his passion for service and education, Ziolkowski left a career in corporate finance to found the nonprofit buildOn in 1991. Since then, he has served as CEO and led the organization in breaking the cycle of poverty and illiteracy through buildOn’s Service Learning Program in the U.S. and Global School Construction Program in the world’s economically poorest countries.

To date, buildOn has mobilized hundreds of thousands of U.S. youth to contribute millions of hours of intensive service in their communities. Once students get involved in buildOn, they come to school 15 more days per year and 98% graduate on time. Globally, hundreds of thousands of parents have contributed over 5 million volunteer workdays to build more than 3,200 schools. There are now more than 400,000 children, parents, and grandparents attending these schools they helped to build. Half of the students are girls.

Ziolkowski is The New York Times bestselling author of Walk in Their Shoes and has been featured on NBC’s TODAY Show, CNN, CBS Evening News, PBS, TED, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. He has also been endorsed by three Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including Mother Teresa, the 14th Dalai Lama, and former President Barack Obama. Ziolkowski received a Doctorate in Humane Letters, honoris causa, from St. John’s University, where he delivered the commencement speech for the 2024 graduating class.

President, Gabelli School Graduate
Student Advisory Council
Graduate Diploma Ceremony Speaker

Daniel Troise, who will be graduating with a master’s in business administration, serves as president of the Gabelli School of Business Graduate Student Advisory Council, and has made his mark as both a leader and a convener. Throughout his time at the Gabelli School, he has encouraged and facilitated student engagement and has made it his mission to promote academic excellence among his peers. Drawn to the School’s collaborative culture, challenging yet flexible curriculum, and New York City location, Troise pursued a dual concentration in communications and finance—a combination that has equipped him to see both the message and the metrics behind effective leadership and across the business functions.

“The Gabelli School offered me a structured path to curiosity, where community and conversation were just as important as the coursework,” he noted.

Troise already had a well-established global career in communications and external relations when he enrolled in the MBA program.

Co-Founder, Blockchain and Fintech Club
Gabelli School of Business

As one of the Class of 2026’s most accomplished undergraduate students, Nellie Podokshik has distinguished herself during her time at the Gabelli School of Business, embarking on an educational journey defined by discipline, reinvention, and purpose. She will be among the top in her class when she receives her BS in Global Business on May 16.

Raised in Brooklyn, Podokshik trained from an early age for a professional ballet career, completing much of her schooling online while pursuing this demanding path. By the time she was contemplating life after high school, she was performing with elite ballet companies and was expecting to accelerate her rise in the arts. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which abruptly changed this carefully planned trajectory.

As theaters closed and ballet companies struggled, faltering due to weakened business infrastructure, Podokshik witnessed firsthand, the widening gap between artistic excellence, creative potential, and the sound business acumen and solid management practices required to sustain arts-related institutions in good times and in bad. “I decided that I wanted to fill that gap and become a leader in a creative field who understands both artistry and performance, as well as the business knowledge that is needed for these organizations to thrive,” she noted.

When Julio Cesar Pantoja ’25 MBA arrived in New York City to begin the Full-time MBA program at the Gabelli School of Business, he brought more than a decade of experience spanning entrepreneurship, public-sector advisory, and media in Colombia, including leadership roles as a co-founder and CEO, sustainability advisor, and documentary producer. As he approached graduation, that breadth of experience, combined with a disciplined and highly strategic job search, helped him stand out in one of the world’s most competitive finance markets. With support from the Gabelli School’s Graduate Student Success Center and Career Development team, Pantoja translated his unconventional but substantial background into a compelling candidacy for corporate finance roles.

From the start, Pantoja approached the MBA as both a technical and leadership platform. Outside the classroom, he served as vice president of the Investment Banking, Private Equity, and Venture Capital Club and founded the Dean’s Advisory Council, both experiences that expanded his network and deepened his engagement with the Gabelli School community. With mentorship from Dean Lerzan Aksoy, PhD, and other faculty members, he refined not only his finance skills, but also his ability to communicate his value with clarity and confidence.

According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report, AI and automation will increase employment growth with the addition of 78 million new jobs projected by 2030. Among the fastest-growing? Big data specialists, fintech engineers, AI and machine learning specialists, and software and applications developers.

While the influence of AI on the job market is already measurable, the pace of this workforce transformation is predicted to accelerate, with half of today’s work activities potentially being automated between 2030 and 2060, according to McKinsey and Company. The global management consulting firm also reports that AI’s influence on productivity and innovation will supercharge the global economy, contributing up to an estimated $13 trillion by 2030.

As these exciting, but sometimes unnerving advances continue to unfold, they will forever change the way we manage and lead people and organizations. To be successful in navigating this new landscape—taking advantage of rapid progress while ensuring a level of stability and integrity—leaders and managers must be well-equipped. They will need to be open and willing to build the new skill sets that will address the changes ahead, while fostering a human-centered culture and cohesive work environment that inspires teamwork, collaboration, innovation, and personal and professional growth.

When firms have collaborative relationships with companies that are in competition with each other, it’s common for them to enter into agreements to prevent knowledge leakage. While these types of arrangements are considered standard operating procedure, Navid Asgari, PhD, warns that they have ramifications.

Asgari, who is an associate professor of strategy and technology management, the Grose Family Endowed Chair in Business, and associate director of the Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center at the Gabelli School, explains that alliance partner demands for intellectual firewalls can lead to disconnectedness in a focal firm’s internal collaborative network, inhibiting the recombination of ideas and stifling innovation. In other words, measures designed to prevent knowledge leakage across firms can unintentionally undermine knowledge recombination within firms.

“Firms may like the idea that their alliance partners are competitors, because it gives them more bargaining power,” he asserted. “But they should be aware that if they are forced to erect these walls, it will ultimately undermine their capabilities in creating new value.”

Going Private Transactions: Structures and Legal Implications (Matthew Bender 2026), offers practitioners, including attorneys, in-house counsel, compliance officers, and business executives, a step-by-step analysis of going private transactions from legal, financial, and procedural vantage points.

A going private transaction is when the publicly held shares of a company are acquired by a controlling shareholder, management, or a private equity firm, and the company is delisted from stock exchanges and terminates its registration with the SEC. In this case, the former publicly held company decided that there would be some advantages to private ownership, perhaps in the case of a struggling organization to make operational changes without glaring public scrutiny, or to free a company from the costs of periodic public reporting. Many well-known businesses have gone private in recent years, including Continental Resources, Inc. in 2022 and Nordstrom, Inc. in 2025.

“If you’re a publicly traded company, you’ve got a lot of pressures on you from investors to meet earnings estimates,” explained author Brent J. Horton, JD, associate professor and area chair of Law and Ethics at the Gabelli School. “It puts a lot of constraints on various directions that you can take the company, different innovations that you can implement.

So a lot of companies, especially if they want to go in a direction that may cause shareholder pushback, go private so that they don’t have to worry about that.” That was the case with Dell Computers, which is one of several case studies included in the book.

This publication is produced by the Office of the Dean of the Gabelli School of Business, with offices at 441 E. Fordham Road, Bronx, NY 10458 and 140 W. 62nd Street, New York, NY 10023.

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