Melissa Thomas-Hunt
UVA Batten School/Darden School
John D Forbes Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Melissa C. Thomas-Hunt is the Senior Associate Dean of the Full-time MBA Program at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. She is also the John Forbes Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business and Professor of Public Policy at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Melissa is the former Head of Global Diversity and Belonging at Airbnb where she led the strategy and execution of global internal diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging programs.
She has also held faculty appointments at Vanderbilt University’s Owen school, where she was Vice Provost of Inclusive Excellence, Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Washington University’s Olin School of Business and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. For 25 years, she has taught MBAs and executives leadership, team dynamics, and negotiations and conducted research on connection and the factors that unleash, leverage, and amplify the contributions made by individuals in teams. Her publications have appeared in Research on Organizational Behavior, Organization Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Business Ethics, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Management Science, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and Research on Managing Groups and Teams. Her book Inclusion Unlocked: A Guide for Leaders to Act was recently published by Wiley Press.
Melissa holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from Princeton University. Melissa has been actively engaged in nonprofit board service. She currently serves on the board of Airbnb.org, the Boys and Girls Club of Central Virginia and Harlem Academy.
