Biographies: Sara Ann McComb is an Associate Professor of Operations Management in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.  She received her B.S.I.E. from GMI Engineering & Management Institute and an M.S.E.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  Professor McComb was an employee of General Motors throughout both her B.S. and M.S. programs where she held many positions including production supervisor, production engineer, buyer, and supplier development engineer.  In 1995, she left General Motors to pursue her Ph.D. at Purdue University in the School of Industrial Engineering.  She completed her Ph.D. program in 1998.  Professor McComb’s research interests are in the area of cross-functional project teams.  Specifically, she is interested in topics such as the internal team processes used by teams, the complexity of team assignments, and the organizational context in which teams function.  To examine these issues, she utilizes a variety of research methods including modeling and simulation, laboratory experiments, and field research.

Ralitza Patrashkova received a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the Technical University, Sofia, Bulgaria in 1995. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests include effective team communication, modeling human behavior in teams, and applying different simulation techniques to social systems modeling. She is a member of INFORMS and AOM.