SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2025: Stony Brook – Gary Sherman

Gary Sherman is an Associate Professor of Management at Stony Brook University’s College of Business where he is also Co-Director of the MBA Program. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Virginia. Before joining Stony Brook, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching and at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School. Dr. Sherman’s research explores (1) social hierarchy and its role in the inner workings of groups and organizations, and (2) behavioral ethics, including the organizational and social conditions that encourage ethical behavior. His work has appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Economist, and the BBC. In 2020, Dr. Sherman was named one of the Best 40 under 40 Business Professors in the World by Poets & Quants.

As MBA Co-Director, I have helped incorporate online instruction into our programs, which include a Hybrid MBA (online asynchronous instruction with periodic in-person meetings) and an Online MBA. These programs are designed to meet the needs of our students, many of whom work full-time and desire the flexibility that online instruction provides. Personally, I teach the required Ethics course in the MBA curriculum, and I am constantly revising my online instruction to foster engagement with students while making the course as easy to navigate as possible. It has been a challenge to take a course I designed for an in-person format and create hybrid and fully online versions, especially since the course relies so much on discussion. The emergence of innovative instructional technologies has helped ease this transition and make the experience for online students as engaging as possible.