Faculty Success Stories

Dr. Richard Ehrhardt: Ex-Nuclear Engineer Reaches 25 Years of Service at Bryan School

During his 25 year career at UNCG, Richard Ehrhardt has witnessed tremendous growth and change at the Bryan School. Over the years, he has served as the department head for Information Systems & Operations Management and as the director of the MBA program (to name just a few of his many roles) and he knows as much about the Bryan MBA curriculum as anyone at UNCG.

“Almost no other evening program in the country has the flexibility and the integrated curriculum that we have. Our seven-week modules, levels of study, and flexible pace provide evening students with the interdisciplinary education typically associated with full-time programs. Students have to complete fundamental level courses in marketing, finance, and other required areas before they can begin the upper-level course work. So when evening students reach the strategic core, they have been exposed to all of the functional areas of business. It combines the interdisciplinary education typically associated with full-time MBA programs and the flexible pace of a part-time program.”

The biggest change he has observed since joining the faculty is the internationalization of the Bryan School. “We now have graduate students and faculty from all over the world and the faculty go abroad regularly to teach, research, and consult,” says Rich, who has taught abroad at The University of Hull in England, Ludwigshafen University of Applied Sciences in Germany, Universite Pierre Mendes France in Grenoble, France, and Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. In fact, this will be the first summer in over ten years that he will not be teaching as a visiting professor abroad.

Rich has set this summer aside to work on several research projects. One of them is with Professor Singh and Professor Iyer on some exciting and futuristic research on the semantic web that looks into the future at how business is conducted over the internet with the use of artificial intelligence. “They have very kindly invited me to join them in their ongoing project that is exploring the future of electronic commerce where intelligent software agents can be used to automate business processes by visiting web sites and making deals or at least getting deals to the point where contracts can be signed.” Rich is also writing a paper with Professor Tullar on optimizing the assignment of workers to tasks and is writing another paper on inventory management.

Rich grew up in Queens and after receiving his bachelor’s in physics from The Cooper Union, he was accepted into the PhD program in physics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Early in his doctoral work, he realized that while physics was great fun, it wasn’t something he wanted to spend his entire life doing. He completed the requirements for a master’s and went to work for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission as a reactor engineer.

He spent six years with the USAEC, including a year at Berkeley where he earned a second master’s in nuclear engineering and a year on assignment in Idaho where he conducted safety research on nuclear reactor systems. While working at the Argonne National Laboratory he became interested in management science and eventually left the Atomic Energy Commission to pursue his PhD in administrative sciences at Yale University. Prior to joining the faculty at the Bryan School in 1982, Ehrhardt taught at Chapel Hill for six years.

-April 2007