Carolyn Woo, the dean of the college of business at Notre Dame, will give the St. Ambrose University Catholic Studies Lecture, "Grace in a Competitive World," at 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 2, at Galvin Fine Arts Center on the St. Ambrose campus. A reception will be held after the lecture, which is free and open to the public.

Her areas of expertise include strategic planning, entrepreneurship, management of innovation and technology, implementation structures and systems, continuous improvement and total quality systems. In her Catholic Studies Lecture, she will address personal behavior and ethics in society.

Woo has served in her present position since 1997. Before that, she was associate executive vice president of academic affairs at Purdue University, and previously was director of the professional master's programs in the Krannert School of Management at Purdue. She joined Purdue as an assistant professor in 1981 and was promoted to full professor in 1991. She earned her bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at Purdue.

She has earned 12 research and teaching awards, including the Distinguished Scholar Award sponsored by the International Council for Small Business and the Salgo-Noren Award for Outstanding Teacher at Purdue's masters programs. In 1998, she was chosen as one of 40 Young Leaders of the Academy by Change magazine, a publication of the American Association for Higher Education.

She has served as a consultant for both large and small corporations, and has taught extensively in executive education programs. Woo serves on the boards of Bindley Western Industries, Inc.; Northern Indiana Public Service Co. Industries, Inc. and AON Corp., all Fortune 500 companies.

Her writings have been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, Journal of Business Venturing, Advances in Strategic Management, Organizational Science, Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings and Frontiers of Entrepreneurial Research.

The St. Ambrose Chair of Catholic Studies was established in 1986 to address concerns of a religious nature, providing for guest lectures in fields that are of concern to the Catholic community. Previous lectures have focused on such topics as theology, history, literature, music, scripture, liturgy and the natural and social sciences.

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