Iona College has appointed William B. Lamb, who currently leads a business school in suburban Boston, as dean of its School of Business in New Rochelle.
Lamb, who joins Iona on Aug. 1, was selected following an international search and review of more than 60 potential candidates, Iona officials said in the announcement. He succeeds Vincent J. Calluzzo, Iona”™s current provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, who served for nearly 10 years as business school dean before moving to the provost”™s role two years ago, and Charles Cante, a professor of information systems who has served as Iona”™s interim business school dean since 2015.
Lamb is a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, who has served as dean of the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at the business-focused liberal arts college since 2014. He previously spent 13 years in administrative posts at Ohio University, where he had considerable experience with online learning, according to Iona officials, and helped launch The Walter Center for Strategic Leadership and the Center for Entrepreneurship.
Iona officials noted that Lamb joins Iona at a pivotal time, as the college in March announced the launch of the Hynes Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation with a $15 million donation from James and Anne Marie Hynes of Greenwich. James Hynes is a 1969 graduate of Iona and telecommunications industry executive. Lamb also will head the business school as it builds a 63,000-square-foot facility on the New Rochelle campus. The “transformational project,” as Iona College President Joseph E. Nyre described the expansion last October, is funded in part by the largest gift in the school”™s history, a $17.5 million donation from Iona trustee and alumnus Robert V. LaPenta, a founding general partner of Aston Capital Partners, a private investment firm in Stamford.
Iona officials said Lamb”™s areas of expertise include knowledge management, technology management and the birth and growth of higher technology industries. His research also has focused on the link between financial performance and corporate social performance. He earned his doctorate in strategic management, with minors in both social issues and philosophy, at Virginia Tech.
Nyre called Lamb “a deeply accomplished academic and administrator and an ideal choice to lead our business school to even higher levels of excellence and innovation.”
“This is a very exciting time to join Iona,” said Lamb, a native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who received bachelor and master”™s degrees from the University of Virginia. “The students, alumni, staff, faculty, and administration have worked extremely hard to take the college to new levels of accomplishment. It is an honor to join this community, and I can’t wait to see what the coming years will bring.”
