Faculty and Instructors

David Niño is the Director of Leadership Rice, where he coordinates a series of programs aimed at developing leadership skills among Rice students.  Prior to this appointment, he served on the faculties of The University of Houston-Downtown and the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in leadership and management.  He also currently teaches executive education courses in the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business

Dr. Niño has 9 years of experience teaching at the university level and 15 years teaching executives.  These courses have focused on topics such as managerial and leadership skills, teamwork, internal and external communications, and strategic management.  He has consulted with corporations in the energy, travel, and high technology industries and with municipal governments in both the U.S. and Mexico.

Dr. Niño has published and researched in the areas of leadership, culture, and knowledge management.  His publications have focused on topics such as how organizational cultures influence patterns of knowledge sharing, the expression of emotions, the use of technology, and ethical decision making.

In addition to research, teaching, and consulting, Dr. Niño has served his communities in many capacities.  While in Austin, he was appointed by the Mayor and City Council to The Ethics Review Commission and to The Environmental Board.  He is also a former volunteer with Big Brother and Big Sisters of America.

D. Michael Lindsay is a sociologist who specializes in issues surrounding leadership, religion, and culture. The author of several books, scholarly articles, and research reports, Lindsay has recently completed the nation's largest and most comprehensive study of public leaders who are people of faith. In 2006 he joined the faculty of Rice University, where he is also assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion, and Urban Life. Previously, he was the Harold W. Dodds Fellow and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow in the department of sociology at Princeton University. He also served as the consultant for religion and culture at The George H. Gallup International Institute. Lindsay's work has garnered multiple awards, including top honors from two international scholarly societies. In the spring of 2008 Dr. Lindsay will be teaching LEAD 375: The Social Dynamics of Leadership.

Department Profile

Deborah Barrett has taught communication for over 25 years, specializing in professional and team communication for the last 20 years. She has taught at Rice University, where she was a lecturer in managerial communications in the MBA program from 1988-1991; at Texas A&M University, where she was a visiting assistant professor in technical writing; and at Houston Baptist University, where she was an associate professor of English and director of the writing specialization and English internship programs. She has coached executives and conducted numerous workshops on writing, presentations, teams, negotiations, consulting, and intrapreneurship for organizations across the world. Her approach to effective professional communication, called, "leadership communication," is the title of her book, published by McGraw-Hill in 2005. In conjunction with Leadership Rice, Deborah Barrett teaches LEAD 321: Leadership Communication, a course that helps students articulate ideas with poise, confidence, and clarity.

Department Profile

John Kimball Kehoe directs the Action Learning Program and teaches courses about organization and management in the MBA and the Executive MBA programs at the Jesse H. Jones School of Management at Rice University. In the Action Learning Program all first year MBA students do projects for host companies, applying what they learned to real business problems. On average projects are completed for 30 companies annually. In addition, Dr. Kehoe teaches courses in Organization Structure and Systems, Change Management in Organizations, Power and Influence in Organizations, Negotiation, and the Management of Service Businesses. He started teaching at the Jones School in 2002 and will be teaching LEAD 309: Leadership Theory to Practice this fall.

Department Profile

Joel Ferguson serves as a senior advisor to private company leaders, specializing in helping emerging companies—privately-owned organizations with up to $25 million in revenues. Joel is a graduate of Rice University and its Jones Graduate School of Management, with degrees in Economics, Management, and Accounting. He currently teaches LEAD 313: Entrepreneurial Leadership, a consistently popular course that helps prepare Rice undergraduates to successfully translate their ideas to marketable products and services.

Jeremy Grace has been involved with Leadership Rice since 2001, serving as a faculty advisor for the former certificate program, a guest lecturer and group leader for the former “club”, and has also designed and taught 3 different classes over the years for Leadership Rice: Leadership Communication, The Rhetoric of Leadership, and The Historical and Intellectual Foundations of Leadership.

Jeremy has a wide variety of academic interests and pursuits ranging from his active participation in the International Jean Gebser Society, to his ongoing research of the Cruzob Maya in Quintana Roo, Mexico. As a former Lecturer in Communication and Assistant Director of the George R. Brown Forensics Society here at Rice, Jeremy is an often interviewed expert of rhetoric and political communication in numerous local and national news broadcast and print media outlets.