The New Dean At Melbourne Wants To Make It Asia-Pacific’s Next B-School Hub

Serge da Motta Veiga bought his last pair of running shoes by prompting AI to tell him what to get. Then he went into a store, tried them on, and has been running in them ever since. The AI’s pick, he says, was spot on. He offers it as a small illustration of how he thinks about the technology: as a complement to human judgment, not a replacement for it.

Now 100 days into his job as dean of the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Business and Economics, da Motta Veiga is betting that same instinct on something bigger than footwear. He’s set out plans to build AI into the curriculum, expand a hands-on internship program for international students, and put Melbourne in the same conversation as the business schools of Singapore and Hong Kong.

“There’s a spot for us actually to be a major player, both university-wise but also economically, in Asia-Pacific,” he says.

A LONG COURTSHIP WITH MELBOURNE

The Faculty of Business and Economics has been shaping policy, corporate governance, and business practice for more than a century. Its graduate arm, Melbourne Business School – jointly owned by the university and the business community – is home to Australia’s first MBA, and that MBA has been the country’s top-ranked for years running, landing 31st globally in the QS Global MBA Rankings 2026, ahead of every other Australian school. The faculty holds both AACSB and EQUIS accreditation, and the University of Melbourne took the top spot in the 2025 AFR BOSS Best Business Schools ranking, unseating UNSW. Da Motta Veiga doesn’t run the faculty alone: he is co-dean alongside Jenny George, who is also Dean of Melbourne Business School.

Da Motta Veiga holds a PhD in business administration from the University of Missouri and a licence in economics from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Before Melbourne, he was Associate Dean for Faculty and Research at NEOMA Business School in France. His earlier career includes posts in the U.S. and France, plus visiting roles in Switzerland and the U.K.

His connection to Melbourne goes back further than his appointment. About 12 years ago, he interviewed for a senior lecturer job at the university, then ended up at American University instead. He kept following what Melbourne was doing over the years. “I feel this is like a hidden gem, to be honest with you,” he says.

What struck him, on that first visit and again after he arrived, was a university far from the rest of the world that, as he sees it, was content with being number one in Australia and not doing much to connect more with the world. Geography isn’t something he can fix – he can’t physically bring Australia closer to everyone else. What he can do is make Melbourne more of a player in the region it’s already in.

4 PILLARS AND A REGIONAL BET

Da Motta Veiga arrived with what he describes as a deliberately simple framework built on four pillars. The first is people and culture: helping faculty navigate an academic profession that’s being reinvented and looks different from the one he was trained into 15 years ago. The second is global identity – a stronger identity around the areas where the faculty is strongest. The last two are what he calls the faculty’s two main engines, like a plane: teaching and research. On teaching, he’s been gathering feedback from alumni and industry leaders on what they need from graduates. On research, he says too much business and economics work is abstract, and he wants to reconnect it to the applied mission business schools were founded on more than 200 years ago.

The regional ambition is central to how he talks about Melbourne’s future. When people think about innovation in the region, he says, they think of the Singaporean and Hong Kong schools. He sees an opening for Melbourne to join them, particularly as Hong Kong’s position shifts.

“I want to do the same with this faculty,” he says.

Getting there means pushing against a cultural instinct he’s still adjusting to. Where the U.S. tends to be more entrepreneurial and driven, he says, Melbourne carries a “British inheritance” – more cautious, more risk-averse, wanting diligence done before any leap. “If you don’t try,” he tells colleagues, “you’re not going to learn.”

‘I DON’T USE AI TO SUPPLEMENT ME. I USE AI TO COMPLEMENT ME’

AI runs through nearly every part of da Motta Veiga’s agenda. He loves using it, he says, but as a complement to his own work rather than a supplement. The faculty is launching a research-driven initiative – called the AI Initiative for now, though the name could change – focused on responsible AI. On the teaching side, his worry is students who use the technology as a substitute for their own work.

His answer is to teach students how to use AI, when to use it, and how to use it responsibly, starting in the first year and not necessarily through a coding course. He wants professors to build AI into assignments: have students decompose the assignment, look at what AI did well, and critique it. A question came up at a recent department meeting about whether students know more about AI than faculty do. He says he doesn’t think so.

“They think they know more because they use AI to substitute,” he says. “But you know more, because you know how to complement with AI.”

The faculty is also redesigning its curriculum around an AI Competency Framework – a name da Motta Veiga is pushing to broaden, arguing the field has moved beyond “AI” to machine learning and large language models. The idea is that every course, whatever the discipline, includes how to use and challenge AI. Because Melbourne’s academic year begins in early 2027, the goal is to have it in place by then.

BETTING ON INDUSTRY TIES & INTERNSHIPS AS A SELLING POINT

Asked for a concrete example of the industry collaboration he’s pushing, da Motta Veiga points to WorkHub, a program built around a floor of the faculty’s building dedicated to on-campus internships with corporate partners, including L’Oréal and Qatar Airways. Students work on site with the participating companies while staying connected to a faculty advisor. The internships are unpaid but count for credit. He says the faculty runs several hundred at any given time, and a new partnership with a major Indonesian company – he won’t name it until it’s signed in early November – is expected to add 70 more.

The push is partly strategic. Australia, like many countries, is getting tougher on international students, and the faculty has a majority of them. They come to a business and economics faculty expecting internships, he says, and many don’t land them.

“Our students are going to turn their back on us if they see we cannot give them internships,” he says.

He plans to travel with two goals: more internships for WorkHub, and more placements back in students’ home markets, including elsewhere in Asia. A student from China, he notes, doesn’t necessarily want to work in China – Singapore or Malaysia might appeal. The pitch he wants to make: come to Melbourne, and the faculty will help you find an internship, then a job.

RECRUITING – AND WHAT COMES NEXT

Nearly 15,000 students are enrolled across the faculty. China is the largest source of international students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, with India a close second among graduate students. About 100 are Americans, a number he wants to grow. He notes that an international student in Melbourne pays about what a domestic student would pay in the U.S.

He’s also working the alumni network personally. He tells the story of introducing himself by email to an alumnus who is a managing director at Blackstone in the Bay Area. The alum wrote back looking for Melbourne investment banking analysts he might recruit, and da Motta Veiga pulled a list of recent graduates from LinkedIn himself and sent it over. It’s the kind of small gesture, he says, that academics don’t do enough of.

Da Motta Veiga is taking the pitch on the road: a Europe tour with stops in Berlin, Paris, and London, where local chambers of commerce are facilitating discussions between the faculty’s research centers and industry partners, followed by a U.S. tour in February.

Asked what “global” means to him, he starts with local. “We have a Melbourne identity,” he says. “We are very strongly based in Melbourne, with our culture, our identity, a very strong base of alums and industry partners.” The impact, he says, should be felt all over the world.

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