Pankaj Kumar has been appointed assistant professor in the Department of Management at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business.

He is one of nine new full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members at Pamplin this fall. Their addition reflects the college’s commitment to hiring faculty to further strengthen its teaching, research, and business outreach, particularly in areas concerning business analytics, innovation and entrepreneurship, and sustainable global prosperity.

Kumar received his Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Minnesota in 2018. He earned an MBA at INCAE Business School in Costa Rica and a bachelor’s degree at Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology in India.

Kumar’s research interests lie at the intersection of strategy and organization theory, with a focus on innovation, interfirm relationships, strategic alliances, and geography.

His dissertation examined the determinants of innovation by firms as a function of their alliance social-structure stability and the geographical location of their subsidiaries that engaged in these alliances.

His other research explores the link between the geographic distance among firms’ alliance partners and the stability of their relational structures and the link between firms’ internationalization and their innovation in host countries.

Kumar co-authored an article that was recently accepted for the Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings.

He has taught courses on fundamentals of management and creative leadership.

Kumar’s industry experience includes being the chief financial officer at Universidad Veritas in Costa Rica and member of the board of directors of CPI Panama. He also worked as a consultant for the Bain and Co. affiliate, Mesoamerica, in Costa Rica and as an assistant manager for Larsen and Toubro in India.

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