New Faculty Members Welcomed at College of Business

Three new faculty members joined the B.I. Moody III College of Business Administration at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in the Fall 2016 semester.

The new faculty members include Dr. Brent Baker, assistant professor of marketing, Dr. Joshua Bendickson, assistant professor of management, and Lisa Bowles, visiting instructor of hospitality management.

Before joining the Moody College of Business faculty, Baker earned a Ph.D. in marketing from University of South Florida and won several awards including Best Paper and Best Reviewer in the 23rd and 28th Annual International Society of Franchising Conferences. He also won the Junior Faculty Scholarship Award from the College of Business and Public Administration at the University of North Dakota. 

Baker continues to focus his research on business to business relationships and his areas of speaking and consulting expertise are on topics surrounding professional and personal selling. He is heavily involved as a professor and coach in the department’s professional sales program.

Minnesota native Joshua S. Bendickson received his Bachelor of Science from St. Cloud State University in 2003 and his MBA from Augsburg College in 2007. He earned his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, where he received the James W. Reddoch Award for excellent teaching by a doctoral student in the Department of Management. While at LSU, he also received the Graduate Teaching Award for the E. J. Ourso College of Business. Prior to joining the Moody College of Business faculty, Bendickson was an assistant professor of management at East Carolina University.

Bendickson’s research interests include strategic human capital, entrepreneurship and international strategy and his work has been published in peer-reviewed books and journals. He is a member of the Academy of Management, the Southern Management Association, and the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

Lisa Kidder Bowles, a native of St. Landry Parish, La., graduated from Louisiana State University in 1997 with a Bachelor of Mass Communication, concentration in public relations. In 2002, Bowles earned a Master of Tourism Administration from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

In 2009 she moved to Austin, Texas to become the director of sales for the Austin Convention Center, where she worked with a team to compete nationally for meetings and conventions. In 2012, she moved back to Louisiana and married Harry Bowles of Carencro, La. She is the mother of two children. She was the director of marketing for the St. Landry Parish Tourist Commission from 2012 to 2015 and served as the director of sales and marketing at the Wyndham Garden Lafayette before joining the Moody College of Business faculty.