Senior, Associate, and Assistant Deans appointed at WFU School of Business
The Wake Forest University School of Business is pleased to announce the appointment and expanded responsibilities of Senior Associate Deans, Associate Deans, and Assistant Deans.
Jeff Camm, Senior Associate Dean of Business Analytics, has been appointed Senior Associate Dean for Faculty; Scott Shafer, Professor of Management, will serve as Associate Dean for the Master of Science in Business Analytics program; Bren Varner will serve as Assistant Dean for the Master of Science in Management program; and Norma Ramirez Montague will continue her role as Senior Associate Dean of Academic Programs with expanded responsibilities.
Camm and Shafer will begin their new appointments on October 1 and Varner will begin his new role on January 1.
“We are delighted to have such strong and experienced leaders in these critical roles,” said Dean Annette Ranft. “Their experience, knowledge, and deep commitment to Wake Forest and our students will be invaluable as we continue to move the School forward.”
Norma Ramirez Montague
Montague is the John B. McKinnon Associate Professor of Accounting, in addition to her current role as Senior Associate Dean of Academic Programs. She joined the School of Business in 2010 as an assistant professor, and in 2018, she began leading the MSM program as Associate Dean. She has taught a variety of accounting and business courses in the School’s undergraduate and graduate business programs. Montague’s academic research primarily focuses on enhancing auditor and investor judgments, as well as developing innovative teaching techniques in accounting courses. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., she worked at an accounting firm and taught accounting at several institutions.
In 2016, Montague received the American Accounting Association’s award for Innovation in Auditing and Assurance Education and the Issues in Accounting Education’s Best Paper Award. Her work has been featured on the cover of the Journal of Accountancy, and has been published in Accounting, Organizations and Society, Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory; Issues in Accounting Education; Current Issues in Auditing; CPA Journal; and Today’s CPA, among others. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the American Accounting Association, the largest community of accountants in academia, as the Director – Focusing on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI). This position helps to support and define the AAA’s DEI strategy and further its initiatives.
Montague earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in accounting from North Carolina State University and a Ph.D. in business administration and accounting from the University of South Florida.
Jeff Camm
Camm is the Senior Associate Dean of Business Analytics, the Inmar Presidential Chair in Analytics, and the Academic Director of the Center for Analytics Impact. Prior to joining Wake Forest, he held the Joseph S. Stern Chair in Business Analytics in the Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati and served as a visiting professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and the School of Engineering at Stanford University.
Camm’s scholarship is on the application of optimization modeling and solution algorithms to difficult decision problems in a diverse set of application areas, including operations planning and scheduling; supply chain optimization; product design; and conservation. His research has appeared in a number of academic journals, including Science, Management Science, Operations Research, the Informs Journal on Applied Analytics, and Sloan Management Review and has been funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Naval Research, and Argonne National Labs. Camm has also consulted for Procter and Gamble, GE, Duke Energy, Starbucks, Road Runner Sports, Brooks Running Shoes and Kroger, among others. Camm received a Ph.D. in management science from Clemson University and a bachelor’s in mathematics from Xavier University in Ohio.
Scott Shafer
Shafer is a Professor of Management and is currently in his 25th year at Wake Forest. During his tenure, he held many leadership roles, including Associate Dean of the MSM program from 2016 – 2018 where the program achieved the ranking of No. 21 globally and No. 4 nationally in The Economist’s 2017 global ranking. He also previously served as the Associate Dean of the full-time MBA Program and the Senior Associate Dean of Graduate Business Programs where he led the development of a comprehensive strategy for graduate programs. Prior to joining Wake Forest, he served as an Associate Professor of Operations Management at Auburn University and as Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the University of Miami.
Shafer’s research interests are in the areas of business analytics, reverse logistics, six sigma, cellular manufacturing, business process design, and organizational learning. His publications have appeared in academic journals such as Management Science, the Journal of Operations Management, Decision Sciences, International Journal of Production Research, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. Shafer is also a co-author of five books in the fields of operations management, project management, and quantitative business modeling. He received a bachelor’s in industrial management, a Bachelor of Business Administration in marketing, and a Ph.D. in operations management from the University of Cincinnati.
J. Bren Varner
Varner is a Senior Lecturer and the Director of the Business and Enterprise Management degree program. He joined Wake Forest in 2006 and previously served as the Program Director for the University Center for Entrepreneurship, where he managed the co-curricular initiatives for the entrepreneurship program and was instrumental in developing the minor in entrepreneurship.
Varner has taught numerous strategy and entrepreneurship courses in the undergraduate, MSM and MBA programs. He began teaching in the MSM program in 2014 where he taught business strategy and planning, problem-solving mindset and the business simulation capstone course. He is the 2022 recipient of the Horace Kelly Alumni Teaching Award and a three-time recipient of the WFU School of Business Senior Class Teaching Award.
Before Wake Forest, Bren worked with numerous entrepreneurial ventures, focused primarily on technology, software, and the internet and provided merger and acquisition advisory services for the software and IT industries. Varner received a bachelor’s degree in business from Wake Forest University and an MBA from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.
Media Contact: Danyelle Gary, garyd@wfu.edu, 336.582.0622
