Jim Moran Professors

The Jim Moran Institute for Global Entrepreneurship professors allow us to provide leading-edge research to small business owners and nonprofit leaders in order to facilitate better business practices. They are scholarly individuals with backgrounds in entrepreneurship or business education and facilitate courses at Florida State University.

Susan S. Fiorito, Ph.D.

Dean of the Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship, Jim Moran Professor of Entrepreneurship

Dr. Susan S. Fiorito is the Dean of the Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship, Jim Moran Professor of Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneur in Residence. Dr. Fiorito has been a faculty member at FSU since 1990. She was an owner of four apparel, leather goods and turquoise jewelry stores in Atlanta, GA and owner of a wholesale leather goods company until 1980. In addition to teaching at FSU she has also taught and conducted research at the University of Iowa, Florida International University and the University of Stirling in Scotland where she taught graduate level courses and developed a module for their Executive MBA program. Dr. Fiorito’s research focuses on retailing, small business management and buying and has been featured in a variety of academic journals, including International Journal of Research and Distribution Management, the Journal of Retailing, and Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice. She has received research grants totaling nearly $170K. In addition, she taught summer study abroad courses in Milan, Paris and London for six years and spent one year on sabbatical at the University of Stirling in Scotland. She has received three University teaching awards, and was selected to be one of three inaugural Jim Moran Institute Faculty Fellows in 2010. She was the first female president from 1992-94 of the American Collegiate Retailing Association since the Association’s inception in 1949 and she is currently the treasurer, also a first for a woman, to hold this position for two consecutive terms. She was appointed to the Board for the Florida Retail Federation in 2003 and has served faithfully since that time. Dr. Fiorito contributes to several university, college and department committees.


Michael Holmes, Ph.D.

Jim Moran Professor of Strategic Management

Dr. R. Michael Holmes Jr. is the Jim Moran Professor of Strategic Management in the Department of Management at Florida State University. In addition, Holmes holds a visiting professor appointment at the University of Johannesburg.

Holmes' research focuses on the psychological foundations of strategy and entrepreneurship and the origins of institutions and their implications for management. It has been published in Academy of Management JournalAcademy of Management Perspectives, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of ManagementJournal of Management StudiesPersonnel Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Strategic Management Journal, among other outlets. Several media outlets have abstracted Holmes' research, and he has presented his work at universities and conferences in more than a dozen countries.

He has taught strategic management and entrepreneurship courses to undergraduate, MBA and doctoral students. Holmes has been nominated for, or has won, several awards for his research, teaching and service. He also serves on the Journal of Management's Editorial Review Board.

Holmes received his B.S. from the University of Alabama and his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University.


Spencer Pierce, Ph.D.

Jim Moran Associate Professor of Business Administration

Dr. Spencer Pierce is the Jim Moran Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Department of Accounting at Florida State University’s College of Business. His primary research interests include financial reporting and disclosure, capital markets and accounting for derivatives. His research has been accepted for publication by outlets such as The Accounting Review, Management Science, Review of Accounting Studies, Contemporary Accounting Research and Journal of Financial Reporting

Pierce received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting from Brigham Young University and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He is a licensed CPA in the state of Colorado.


Susana C. Santos, Ph.D.

Jim Moran Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship

Dr. Santos is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship at Florida State University. She received her Ph.D. from ISCTE-IUL Business School, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Portugal and completed her post-doctoral work in the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business. Before joining JMC, she was a tenured Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship in the School for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Rowan University, where she also served as Associate Director of the Rowan Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Dr. Santos has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers. Her primary research interests focus on the intersection of entrepreneurship and adversity, in particular under conditions of poverty. Other research interests include social entrepreneurship, gender, entrepreneurship education, and individual and team level processes in entrepreneurship.

Dr. Santos’s work has been published in leading outlets including Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Business Venturing, Small Business Economics, Journal of Small Business Management, and Journal of Business Venturing Insights. She co-authored the book “Poverty and entrepreneurship in developed countries” and co-edited Volumes 5 and 6 of the “Annals of Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy”. Presently she serves as Co-Editor of the Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship and Associate Editor for the Journal of Small Business Management.

From 2019-2023 she served on Board of Directors of the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, the nation’s premier academic organization focused on advancing the discipline of entrepreneurship education. Dr. Santos is a founding member of the Global Partnership for Poverty and Entrepreneurship and an active member of the University of Notre Dame’s Urban Business and Poverty Initiative.


Guangzhi Shang, Ph.D.

Guangzhi Shang Headshot

Jim Moran Associate Professor of Business Administration

Guangzhi Shang’s current research has two primary themes: consumer returns management and service labor issues. He investigates consumer returns management from a variety of angles, including how a retailer should set its optimal return policy, how an OEM or a retailer could better forecast the quantity of returns and how a retailer could assess the value of its return policy. For the service labor issues, he focuses on the context of live-chat contact centers. Research questions include the impact of customer’s waiting experience on the progress of a chat session, agent’s ability to learn from their past experiences and the customer-agent matching problem.

Apart from these two themes, his on-going research also covers the cutting edge topics including the blockchain technology such as Bitcoin, the crowdsourcing platforms such as Kickstarter, new revenue management technologies such as the standby upgrade and sports analytics such as using options to ration the short-in-supply college football playoff game tickets.

Guangzhi’s research has been published in leading academic journals such as Production and Operations Management, Journal of Operations Management and Decision Sciences. His research has been a finalist in the best service operations papers published during 2017 and 2018 in Production and Operations Management, the 2018 Jack Meredith Best Paper Award of Journal of Operations Management and the 2020 Production and Operations Management Society Operational Excellence Best Paper Award.

He is a department editor for the Journal of Operations Management (Empirical Research Methods Department) and Decision Sciences (Retail Operations Department). His review contribution to the academic community is recognized by the 2018 best reviewer award of Journal of Operations Management, the nomination of the 2017 best reviewer award of Production and Operations Management and the 2019 outstanding reviewer award of Decision Sciences.

Guangzhi enjoys doing practice-driven research. He is a frequent invited speaker at leading industry conferences such as the annual Consumer Returns Conference. He also co-produces a column in the Reverse Logistics Magazine named “View from Academia,” aimed at disseminating fresh-off-the-press academic knowledge among industry professionals dealing with consumer returns.