Melissa Garrido Hlavac

Melissa Garrido Hlavac is Chief Strategy Officer and Senior Associate Dean of Innovation, Strategy & Partnerships at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School. Prior to this leadership position, she served as Associate Dean of MBA Programs including working professional, executive, and full-time programs.

 

Melissa first joined UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School as Director of Business Development in Executive Development. She went on to lead various initiatives at the school before moving into the position of Managing Director of MBA Programs where she led the unification and reconfiguration of the individual MBA program operations into one organization.

 

Prior to joining UNC-Chapel Hill, Melissa resided in New York City and worked on the strategy, revenue generation, and editorial sides of media companies. She was Managing Director of Advertising at The New York Times and also served as an Analyst for The New York Times' Strategic Planning team which recommended business strategies to executive management. In addition, Melissa served as Advertising Director at Reader’s Digest for Selecciones, the largest globally circulated Spanish language publication, and was a journalist at several media companies.

 

Concurrently with her positions at Kenan-Flagler, Melissa also served in an elected position as a member of the Board of Education for Chatham County Schools in Pittsboro, North Carolina for nearly eight years.

 

Melissa earned her MBA from the University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business where she was a Provost Fellow and the recipient of an NSHMBA fellowship and received her BS in Journalism from the University of Florida. She was also a recipient of the P. Rambo scholarship to study abroad at the Paris-Sorbonne University in France.