Dean Of The Year: H. Rao Unnava Of UC-Davis Graduate School Of Management

A JOURNEY FROM INDIA SHARED BY MANY SUCCESSFUL INDIAN ACADEMICS

His journey from Hyderabad, India, to the U.S. is a journey shared by many Indian immigrants who came to study at a U.S. university and then remained to stay and pursue an academic career. Unnava is one of three children brought into this world by a father who ultimately became the personnel manager for a state utility and a mother who later in life became a professor of languages, teaching students to speak Hindi and Telugu.

From the age of seven, when he came home with a report card with the highest grades in his class, the academic life beckoned. Unnava discovered his destiny early when he began helping his mother tutor young children after school in the family home. He began teaching when he was in the fourth grade at St. Ann’s School in Hyderabad. “That led to my interest in teaching,” recalls Unnava, who also was encouraged to develop public speaking skills by his mother who dispatched him to elocution competitions, debates, and math and science Olympiads. 

In sixth grade, he ventured onto the stage of an elocution contest, only to freeze. “I completely forgot everything,” he laughs. “I went blank and stood there for three minutes in silence. I walked off with my head hung low, determined that it would never happen again.” The next time, he walked off the winner.

‘YOU BELONG IN AMERICA’

Though he initially wanted to learn accounting, Unnava changed his mind and earned his undergraduate degree in electronics engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in Hyderabad. When he sat for the Common Admission Test (CAT) taken to gain admission to one of the then three existing Indian Institutes of Management in Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta, only 360 seats were available for the 125,000 hopeful test takers. At IIM-Calcutta, 600 candidates were short-listed; Unnava was one of the 100 admitted.

After earning his MBA, he landed a job in computer sales but that was not to last, despite two quick promotions. Three months after earning his business degree, he was asked to teach an evening MBA course at Jawaharlal. “It went very well. Students wanted me to teach another class and that is when I realized I was enjoying teaching more than I did my day job,” he says.

His father often joked that Unnava was more suited to a life in the U.S. than in India, mostly because he would disregard male Indian protocol to help others, from preparing a cup of coffee for the family’s servant maid to rinsing his dinner plate after a meal. “‘You don’t belong in India,’” he recalls his father saying. “‘You belong in America.’”

A DEANSHIP REALIZED

Unnava arrived in the U.S. with his young wife, Vasu, who he had met in engineering school. When they came for PhDs at Ohio State University, the pair had to be tutored on American culture and rituals from Halloween and Thanksgiving to Christmas, holidays they had never celebrated. Four years later, armed with his PhD, he chose to stay at Ohio State. He threw himself into his discipline of marketing, moving up the ranks from assistant professor to a full professorship with tenure. After turning down a chance to become a senior associate dean in 2012, a time when he stretched his entrepreneurial muscles by forming Angie’s List, he later reconsidered to take the job two years later.

Responsible for all academic programs offered by Fisher, Unnava soon found himself on search lists for deanships. Leaving Ohio State, where he had spent the past 32 years, could not have been easy. But he and his wife packed up and moved west to begin his extraordinary deanship. The school was then running a deficit with a faculty of just 25 professors. The student body was largely limited to a full-time MBA program with annual intakes of about 45 students, a pair of part-time MBA programs in Sacramento and San Ramon, with a total enrollment of some 270 students, and a master’s of professional accountancy, with an annual intake of fewer than 35 students. Truth be told, the school had just been through a round of staff cutbacks. Forever in the shadow of its higher-ranked UC cousins, Berkeley Haas and UCLA Anderson,  Davis was often underappreciated and overlooked. 

Today, the faculty has grown to 31 tenure and tenure-track faculty, 40 lecturers, and a staff of 75 devoted to high levels of service to students. A master’s in business analytics just enrolled its largest cohort: 105 students in San Francisco. The school’s online MBA program is the first and only UC system online MBA. A new master’s in management program, also the first in a UC system school, welcomed its first online class in April and its first on-campus cohort this fall. Unnava has also launched credit-bearing certificates, bundles of four courses, that the school is marketing directly to companies.

THIRTY YEARS IN THE MAKING: AN UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS DEGREE AT DAVIS

A lifetime learning platform for alumni called eos is now in place. Among other things, it offers some 1,000 video lectures by faculty to alums for free and allows alumni to easily find and connect individually and by affinity group. Most surprisingly, perhaps, is the forthcoming launch of an undergraduate business major, an initiative made possible by a savvy collaboration with Davis’ College of Letters & Science and its College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences which has a managerial economics major taken by some 1,400 students.

“That was 30 years in the making,” says Provost Croughan. “For 30 years people have been asking for an undergraduate business major and students this fall in 2024 can finally apply for that. But a lot of people looked at that and said why are you bringing undergraduates into a graduate school of management? It required collaborating with two other colleges and in that process working out who would teach which courses, how many faculty would you recruit for the new degree program, and how would the curriculum work given accreditation processes for business schools where you need essentially a much more boutique and individualized education for the last two years. That needed to happen here in the Graduate School of Management.  So working out those collaborations and issues in developing the undergraduate business major was quite a feat.”

In fact, Unnava’s predecessor had tried to gain the major. By the time it was rejected by a faculty council in June of 2017, Unnava had already been in the job a full year. He decided to wait a full year before trying again. Instead of making his own proposal, he invited the Academic Senate to propose a solution after making the case that the market demand for the major was obvious. At many other universities, undergraduate business students account for one in four of all university students.

Soon after arriving as Provost, Croughan held a meeting with Unnava in August of 2020 during which he was asked about his priorities. Top on the list was the undergraduate major. A faculty committee with two professors from each of the three schools was put together to work on it. The group agreed to a set of guidelines, including that the major would be housed in the Graduate School of Management which also would confer the degree. Their conclusions led to a second faculty committee that would ultimately recommend the design and structure of the major involving all three schools. Since the initial rejection in 2017, it will have taken eight full years before the first students are enrolled in the program.

Concedes Unnava, “It was a long, drawn-out debate. But the credit goes to six faculty members, two from each school, and then the provost. They did a remarkable job of stepping in when it was needed. I feel very lucky. I have been blessed with great people around me.”

THE UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS PROGRAM COULD BE AMONG THE MOST SELECTIVE EVER

Professor Chellie Higgins has worked closely with Unnava for years. When he arrived at Davis, Chellie Higgins began interacting with him as chair of the school’s Faculty Executive Committee. She would later serve for five years as an associate dean until last year. “His leadership style is one where he puts a lot of passion into his job,” says Higgins. “With that, he likes to be innovative and stay on top of things. He is always thinking about what to do next. He hits some headwinds with his ideas because of the bureaucracy at UC Davis and because we have a shared governance system. But Rao is persistent. He was very strategic and innovative in saying, ‘How can we make this work?’”

He predicts the undergraduate program will be among the most selective in the world with a potential admit rate of only 2%. “The first round we will only take 135 into the program and we expect multiple thousands of applications. So we will bring one of the best classes possible. Applications are open for the beginning of the Fall of 2025. The idea is to have a class every year of no more than 300 students, with 175 direct admits, 75 internal transfers, and another 50 students who will be transferred from outside. In the first five years, the enrollment cap will be 300 a year.”

Many would have given up, frustrated and defeated. But Unnana is a self-declared eternal optimist. James Kelly, the assistant dean for finance and administration, often counsels the dean “not to count your chickens before they hatch because a few of them may die.” Unnava works under a different pretense. “I count the chickens before the eggs are laid,” he laughs. “I am the born optimist in the group.”

Dean Unnava’s Growth Agenda

Since becoming dean of UC Davis Graduate School of Management in June of 2026, H. Rao Unnava has led a revolution in innovation. Here’s a roadmap of the new programs the school has launched under his leadership, from new partnerships with other schools and departments to new degrees. Nearly 70% of this year’s 441 incoming graduate students are in programs created under his watch, not including his collaborations with other university departments and schools.

Year	Initiative
2017	Launch of MS in Business Analytics in San Francisco
2017	Launch of Industry Immersions in Biotech, Food, and Sustainable Energy for MBA Students
2017	Launch of Business Certificate with the Department of Viticulture & Enology
2018	Gains STEM designation for MBA, MPAc and MSBA
2018	Launch of Business Certificate with School of Veterinary Medicine
2019	Launch of Online MBA
2019	Launch of Leadership Track Program with School of Nursing
2021	Launch of Deferred Tuition Program for MBA Students
2021	Launch of Stackable Certificate Portfolio
2024	Launch of On-Campus & Online Master in Management
2024	Launch of Lifetime Learning Platform for Alumni
2025	Launch of STEM Designated Undergraduate Business Major
2025	Launch of a Three-Course Business Program with the Department of Biomedical Engineering
2025	Launch of LLM-MBA Dual Degree with School of Medicine