Executive
Compensation
FundamentalsCornell Certificate Program

Steven Carvell joined the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration’s finance faculty in 1986 and is currently a Professor of Finance in the SC Johnson College of Business. Over the past 33 years, he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses such as Advanced Corporate Finance, Capital Budgeting, Financial Strategy, and Investments. Dr. Carvell has also been an active teacher in executive education since 1990, working with almost every major domestic and international hotel company to create custom courses for hotel executives with companies like Hilton, Marriott, InterContinental Hotel Group, Taj Hotels, Jumeirah, Accor, Sol Melia, Le Meridien, Shangri La, and Peninsula. Dr. Carvell has also authored eight distance-learning courses through eCornell that are among the most widely demanded courses offered. He has held academic leadership positions at the School of Hotel Administration since 1999, serving as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2007 to 2016 and the Academic Director of the Pillsbury Institute for Entrepreneurship from 2013 to 2016.

Dr. Carvell has published numerous articles in academic and professional journals, including the Financial Analysts Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management, the Harvard Business Review, and the Cornell Quarterly, and he is the co-author of “In the Shadows of Wall Street.” His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, Institutional Investor, Financial World, and Leaders. Dr. Carvell has recently finished a major project designed to identify the determinants of hotel demand for U.S. hotels and another on economic and capital market antecedents of venture capital commitments. He is currently working on a project to disaggregate hotel room rates within urban markets and another to determine the risk-return characteristics of hotel room rates in major U.S. markets. Dr. Carvell is also involved with evaluating the effectiveness of hotel company business strategies using strategic benchmarking and economic value-added analysis.

Dr. Carvell has worked for professional money managers in the area of applied strategy in the equity market and served as a consultant to the Presidential Commission on the 1987 stock market crash. His consulting interests include valuation and risk analysis in feasibility studies, hotel debt capacity, strategic benchmarking, and corporate and financial strategy.

Scott Gibson is the J.E. Zollinger Professor of Finance at the College of William and Mary Mason School of Business. His current research interests include optimal financing strategies for hospitality firms and the effect of institutional investor trading behavior on securities prices. His research has appeared in hospitality-focused journals including the Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, Journal of Hospitality Financial Management, the Cornell Hospitality Report and top finance journals including the Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Financial Intermediation, International Review of Finance, Journal of Portfolio Management, and Journal of Financial Services Research.

His research has also been featured widely in the financial press, including articles in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, Barron’s, Business Week, Bloomberg, Financial Advisor, and Institutional Investor.

Before returning to his alma mater Boston College where he received a Ph.D. in Finance, Professor Gibson worked as an analyst with Fidelity Investments and as a credit team leader serving a Fortune 500 clientele with HSBC Bank. Lecturing about corporate finance and the creation of shareholder value, he has received numerous teaching awards at the undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels. He has also been named as an outstanding faculty member in Business Week’s Guide to the Best Business Schools. Professor Gibson currently serves as an editorial board member of the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly (CQ).

Diane Burton is a professor in the ILR School at Cornell University. Her primary appointment is in human resource studies, with courtesy appointments in organizational behavior and sociology. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty in 2009, Professor Burton was a faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She began her academic career at the Harvard Business School teaching leadership and organizational behavior. Professor Burton earned her Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford University and served as a lecturer and researcher in organizational behavior and human resources management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Brian Dunn has been a lecturer at Cornell University since 2015 where he teaches courses in Executive Compensation. Mr. Dunn has a number of ongoing consulting clients and frequently serves as an expert witness on executive compensation issues. He retired as the Chairman of McLagan and the CEO of Performance, Reward & Talent for Aon Hewitt Consulting Worldwide at the end of 2015. In 2016 he served as a special advisor to the Vatican where he developed plans for a new HR function and helped create an executive development program for Vatican leaders.

Mr. Dunn currently serves on the Board of Directors of Silvercrest Asset Management where he is Chairman of the Compensation Committee and a member of the Governance and Audit Committees. He continues to be a Board Member of Spire Technologies and of the Phi Delta Theta Educational Foundation where he is chair of the Audit Committee and a member of the Investment Committee. He is also a member of the Board of Directors for Sullivan & Cotter, a private health care consulting firm. Before his retirement, Mr. Dunn specialized in incentive and executive compensation where he helped companies and their boards design and implement short and long-term incentive plans for executives and advised Boards on levels and forms of Directors compensation. Mr. Dunn has worked with dozens of private firms, helping develop partnership and phantom equity plans as well as assisting in creating compensation packages for newly hired executives. Mr. Dunn received a B.S. degree summa cum laude from the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University in 1977 and an M.B.A. with highest honors from the Cornell University Graduate School of Management in 1981.

Mr. Lowman has more than 30 years of experience consulting with companies across a range of industries in the areas of executive compensation, total reward strategy, performance management and leadership.

He provided testimony to the House Committee for Government Oversight and Reform on the independence of executive compensation, provided counsel to the SEC and met with staff members of the Senate Banking Committee to advise on the rules governing the use and disclosure of board advisors on executive compensation matters.

Mr. Lowman co-authored Closing the Engagement Gap, a book focused on how companies can drive higher levels of employee engagement to improve business performance. He was named one of the World’s Top 25 consultants by Consulting Magazine.

Mr. Lowman received a B.A. in English from Randolph-Macon College, and an M.B.A. in Finance from the Raymond A. Mason School of Business at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.