Christopher Myers, PhD '15

I’m originally from North Carolina and completed my undergraduate degrees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While in North Carolina, I worked as an outdoor education instructor, leading rock climbing, backpacking and kayaking expeditions across the state. This is where I first developed an interest in understanding the processes of group learning and development. My current research interests are in management and organizational behavior, examining how individuals, dyads, and groups learn and perform in modern organizations. Through my work I explore the ways people can better learn from their own experiences, and those of others, to succeed in knowledge-intensive work environments. I am especially interested in understanding how these learning processes impact healthcare organizations, with a focus on medical transport teams (such as pre-hospital, ambulance and air-medical teams).

I chose to earn my PhD in Management & Organizations at Ross because of the collaborative, supportive community of faculty and students here, and the opportunity to be exposed to many different disciplines and approaches to research. My research inherently crosses literatures and levels of analysis, examining not only interpersonal learning interactions, but also individual learning characteristics and overarching organizational learning structures. This kind of interdisciplinary work is possible at Michigan because of the deep ties between various departments and schools, and the easy access graduate students have to experts across many fields. At the same time, PhD students at Ross (and at the University more broadly) are encouraged to develop their own identity as scholars and pursue questions that are not only theoretically novel, but that can have meaningful impact on the world. It was this unique combination – being encouraged to pursue independent, impactful research, but within a diverse and supportive community of scholars – that made Ross stand out among other management PhD programs, and has prepared me well for a career as a professor.