Charles L. “Chuck” Munson, associate professor of operations management, has been named the new director of the Office of Graduate Programs in the College of Business and Economics at Washington State University.
Munson’s appointment begins August 1. He succeeds professor Val Miskin, who will return to teaching in the fall. Miskin led the graduate programs office for 19 years.
“In addition to building on the many quality improvements put into place by Dr. Miskin to help get us through the AACSB reaccreditation, Chuck will also implement changes recommended by the MBA Program Task Force for the Pullman-based MBA and help lead a transformation of that program in order to take it up to the next level,” said Len Jessup, CBE dean.
For example, structural changes made to the MBA program will lead to a more compact, focused graduate program with closer faculty involvement and more opportunities for students, such as MBA case competitions. Another change to the program will be adopting a cohort model for students, where new students will enter as one group and move through the program together as a team.
“In addition to more corporate contacts in general, we are planning to have all future MBA students go through a supervised summer internship after their first year in the program,” Munson said. “We will be working this coming academic year to set up some of those corporate contacts.”
Munson, a Virginia native raised in Arkansas, earned a bachelor’s degree in finance and a master’s degree and doctorate in operations management from Washington University. He joined WSU’s business and economics college in 1997 as an assistant professor and has taught at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. His recent research focuses on the appeal of partially centralized purchasing policies as well as the improved profit functions for newsvendor models with normally distributed demand. His most recent article, “Resource Allocation with Lumpy Demand: To Speed or Not to Speed,” was published in Naval Research Logistics.
He was recently awarded tenure and promoted to the rank of associate professor. Among several awards this year, Jessup named him a Dean’s Fellow, the college gave him the Outstanding Faculty in Research award for 2004, and he received an International Business Institute research grant. In 2003, Munson received a teaching innovation award from the college. He is also a founding advisory board member for WSU’s new President’s Teaching Academy.
Graduate programs in the CBE are offered at the master’s and doctoral levels. Students can earn master’s degrees in accounting, economics and business administration. JD and MBA degrees are also offered as well as a doctoral degree in economics and in six concentrations in business administration.
