Sebastian Văduvă

Director @ The Griffiths School

Dr. Văduva is a successful Romanian-American entrepreneur with extensive international experience in marketing and sales in both U.S. and Romanian companies. Having immigrated to the US in 1989 at the age of 12, he started his first business at 17 and his second one three years later. After completing his undergraduate studies with a marketing degree, he obtained his MBA from the Weatherhead School of Management at CWRU at the height of the dot.com boom and bust, experiencing the ups and downs of the technology wave. In 1999 he became one of the youngest International Business and Marketing instructors at the University of Akron and in 2001, the director of The Center for Organizational Development within that university. At the same time he was co-directing a sizable US State Department grant under which he pursued a doctoral degree at the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest in the area of comparative entrepreneurial systems and mentalities. In 2004 he was recruited by the Fulbright commission as an international MBA program director and in 2005 became the Dean of the Griffiths School of Management. As the Managing Director of Advanced Solutions, Sebastian has delivered over 6.000 hrs. of corporate executive education in the areas of leadership, entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial mentality, communication and presentation, sales and marketing, customer orientation, team management and motivation, etc. Over the last six years his work has been predominantly in the Romanian IT sector where he continues to train, mentor and coach numerous companies in the broad area of talent development at the middle and upper management level, having over 6000 hours of on site training. Also, Dr. Văduva is the Co-Founder of the Informal School of IT, a company that provides courses in programing, testing and project management in IT.