Staats, Bradley R.

Bradley R. Staats is the dean of the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the John T. Stuart III Centennial Chair in Business, the Centennial Chair in Business Education Leadership and the Lois and Richard Folger Dean’s Leadership Chair. He is also a professor in the Department of Information, Risk, and Operations Management. Staats, a UT alumnus, is the former senior associate dean for strategy and academics at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School. He began his appointment as McCombs dean on July 1, 2026.

At North Carolina, Staats oversaw academic strategy and program excellence in the undergraduate business, Master of Accounting, Master of Science in Management, and MBA programs. Before serving as senior associate dean, he was associate dean of MBA programs, where he helped lead curricular and programmatic transformation and expanded industry partnerships. He also founded the UNC Center for the Business of Health.

An educator and scholar in operations management and organizational learning, Staats studies how and under what conditions individuals, teams, and organizations can perform their best. His research bridges operations, analytics, and behavioral science, with applications in the healthcare, technology, and service industries. He has published frequently in both leading academic journals and practitioner-focused journals and is the author of the award-winning book “Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive.”

Before academia, he worked for Goldman Sachs and a venture capital firm.

Staats earned a B.S. in electrical engineering and a B.A. in Plan II and Spanish from UT. He went on to obtain both an MBA and a doctorate in technology and operations management from Harvard Business School.