Darden's Interim Dean Does Not Want To Be The School's Permanent Leader

Mike Lenox, interim dean of the Darden School of Business

The University of Virginia has chosen a long-time Darden School of Business strategy professor and administrator as interim dean who declared from the onset that he has no interest in taking on the job permanently.

Michael Lenox, who joined Darden in 2008 from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, succeeds Scott Beardsley who became president of UVA on Jan. 1. Lenox brings a long line of administrative experience to the job for Poets&Quants’ highest ranked public business school, having served as a senior associate dean, the associate dean of innovation programs, and the executive director of UVA’s Batten Institute.

In a rare move, however, the announcement of Lenox’s appointment by Interim UVA Provost Brie Gertler makes clear that he has no interest in doing the job on a permanent basis. “Mike has the experience, acumen, integrity, and deep familiarity with Darden’s values and programs to propel Darden forward, and I am deeply grateful for his willingness to serve in this critically important role,” Gertler said in a statement. He added that Lenox advised her that he will not apply for the role of Darden dean.

TWO OBVIOUS INTERNAL CANDIDATES FOR PERMANENT DEAN AT DARDEN

Darden VIce Dean Yael Grushka-Cockyane

While a global search for the 10th dean of Darden will soon be launched, with a goal of announcing a permanent dean by the fall, there are at least two obvious internal candidates.

Yael Grushka-Cockayne and Melissa Thomas-Hunt, who were both appointed vice deans in February of last year, would immediately become clear favorites in any search. Grushka-Cockayne, a master teacher at a school best known for its superb MBA teaching faculty, is currently senior associate dean for the flagship full-time residential MBA program. Thomas-Hunt, who has worked for both IBM and Airbnb, is senior associate dean for professional degree programs. Both are highly accomplished, dynamic and impactful players, making it highly likely that Darden will name the first woman as dean in the school’s history.

Grushka-Cockayne has been a mainstay professor at Darden for 16 and one-half years, having joined the school as an assistant professor in 2009. She has collected a bevy of teaching awards during those years, including the 2024 Darden Executive MBA Transformational Faculty Award. She also received Darden Outstanding Faculty Awards in 2013 and 2022 and won the University of Virginia All University Teaching Award in 2015.

Before assuming leadership of Darden’s full-time MBA last year, she had been senior associate dean for professional degree programs, including the Executive MBA, part-time MBA and MSBA with the UVA McIntire School of Commerce. She also serves as an academic director of the LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business and a special advisor to the UVA Provost on AI. Grushka-Cockayne’s teaching and research focuses on data science, forecasting, project management and behavioral decision-making.

GRUSHKA-COCKAYNE SEEMS TO HAVE AN EDGE

Given her impact at the school, helping to launch Darden’s part-time MBA in the D.C. metro area and the school’s first joint degree with McIntire along with her bonafides in the highly critical field of artificial intelligence, Grushka-Cockayne would appear to have an edge on becoming Darden’s next permanent dean. She also spent two years as a visiting associate professor at Harvard Business School in 2018-2020 and has been a professor of data science at UVA’s School of Data Science for the past two and one-half years. If she wants the deanship and fails to get it, Grushka-Cockayne will immediately be high on the list for other dean searches by higher ed headhunters , including HBS.

While she was born in the U.S. to an American mother and an Israeli father, she moved to Israel as a young child. Her interest in teaching others came early, even serving as an instructor during her mandatory military service in Israel when she worked in ordinance and logistics. She also had the opportunity to teach and to dive into research when earning her bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and management from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the southern part of Israel in 2002. Grushka-Cockayne then moved to the United Kingdom to earn her master of science degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2003 before picking up her Ph.D. in management science and operations at the London Business School in 2009.

Thomas-Hunt has had a more varied academic career with stints at Washington University’s Olin Business School, Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, and of course, Darden. She has researched and taught leadership, team dynamics and negotiations for more than 25 years to MBAs and executives.

THOMAS-HUNT WOULD BRING CORPORATE AND VICE PROVOST EXPERIENCE TO THE JOB

Darden Vice Dean Melissa Thomas-Hunt

She first came to Darden in 2009 as an associate professor with tenure from Cornell. She then stayed at Darden for eight years, rising to senior associate dean in 2016. Thomas-Hunt was then lured to Vanderbilt in 2017, becoming vice provost of inclusive excellence of the university for a short two-year timeframe.

She then took a detour from her academic career to join Airbnb in San Francisco in 2019 as a vice president and executive team member in charge of diversity and belonging. Thomas-Hunt returned to Darden two and one-half years later, while remaining a senior advisor at Airbnb for another two and one-half years. She oversaw Darden’s full-time MBA program as a senior associate dean for two years from July of 2023 to July of 2025 before succeeding Grushka-Cockyane as head of the school’s professional degree programs. All told, she has been at Darden for 12 and one-half years.

Daughter to educators, Thomas-Hunt earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Princeton University which she used to join IBM as a sales rep in New York. After one of her major IBM clients was swallowed in a merger, she became fascinated by the people aspects of the deal and left IBM to pursue a Ph.D. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in organizational behavior. She earned her degree in 1997 before joining WashU and then Cornell for more than nine years.

LENOX WOULD HAVE BEEN HIGH ON THE LIST FOR PERMANENT DEAN

At UVA, Thomas-Hunt serves as a professor of public policy at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and is founding academic director of the Behavioral Research at Darden (BRAD) Lab, an interdisciplinary lab supporting the development and application of behavioral science to business and society. In 2017, she received the highest research award presented by the School, the Darden Wells Fargo Research Award.

If not for ruling out the permanent job, Lenox would also have been high up on the list as a likely successor for the next Darden deanship. Honored by Poets&Quants as one of the top 40 business professors under 40 in 2011, he has not only taught and lead at Darden. He also holds an appointment as a Professor of Public Policy (by courtesy) at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He teaches the core MBA strategy course and an MBA elective on Strategy in the Digital Age, among other offerings.

In a message to the Darden community, Lenox said he is honored to help steward the school in the interim role. “My goal is to continue our ascent and to set up our next Dean and the School for further success and impact, building on the momentum as we work towards Darden’s 75^th anniversary in 2030,” he said in a statement.

He served as a special advisor to Beardsley leading special projects and a special advisor to the university provost. In 2023, he was asked by UVA’s President to serve as the inaugural Donna & Richard Tadler University Chair of Entrepreneurship and to lead a new Pan-University Entrepreneurship Initiative as a Special Advisor to the Provost. In addition, he is a Senior Faculty Fellow for the UVA Miller Center where he is an Academic Director for the Program on Democracy and Capitalism. From 2016 to 2023, he served as the Senior Associate Dean and Chief Strategy Officer for the Darden School. From 2008 to 2016, he served as Associate Dean of Innovation Programs and Academic Director of Darden’s Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He helped found and served as the inaugural president of the multiple-university Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability.

Prior to joining Darden in 2008, Lenox was a tenured professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, where he served as the area coordinator for Fuqua’s Strategy Area and the faculty director and founder of Duke’s Corporate Sustainability Initiative. He received his Ph.D. in Technology Management and Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999 and the degrees of Bachelor and Master of Science in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia. Professor Lenox has served as an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and as a visiting professor at Stanford University, Harvard University, Oxford University and IMD in Switzerland.

DON’T MISS: Commentary: Let Scott Beardsley Lead — And Keep UVA Out Of The Political Crossfire or Meet Virginia Darden’s MBA Class Of 2026

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