June A. West

Education:  B.S. Ed., The University of Tennessee, Knoxville; M.Ed., Kent State University; Ed.D., Lehigh University

June West joined the faculty at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in 1997 where she is the Marjorie R. Sands Associate Professor of Business Administration. She specializes in organizational communication, leadership, strategy, and change management and teaches in Darden’s MBA and Executive Education programs, Center for Global Initiatives and iLab Incubator. She is the chair of The Darden Leadership Communication Council, a group of executive and organizational communicators from the business, government, civil society, media, and academic sectors. She is UVA’s Faculty Liaison to the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and teaches at the Federal Executive Institute. Professor West leads a Darden faculty team that teaches in the summer orientation program for the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows Program. This program places active-duty military officers in corporations for a nine-month fellowship.

At Darden, she enjoys the entrepreneurial culture and opportunities to collaborate with colleagues throughout UVA on curriculum design for worldwide initiatives. Professor West was instrumental in the inception of the Partnership for Leaders in Education (PLE), a program with UVA’s Curry School of Education, and served as the academic director.  Its mission is to provide executive education for pre-collegiate administrators who are working on turning around the nation’s lowest performing schools. The success of the PLE led her to work with several universities to develop their own school turnaround programs. Today, her focus is with state superintendents of education and their senior cabinet administrators.  She also has served as the co-director of the Leadership Partners in Healthcare Management, a joint program with UVA’s Schools of Nursing and Medicine.

Her work in education includes teaching at both the college and pre-collegiate levels. Professor West was a member of the Study of Schooling, one of the first comprehensive research studies of pre-collegiate education. She designed and directed the Center for Business Communication at Lehigh University where she also was a faculty member. As an assistant professor of communication at Seton Hall University, she served on the design teams for the University’s virtual university and its executive graduate degree program in corporate communication. With her late husband Dr. Frederic West, she founded the Hobbs School, a Washington, DC, based pre-school for children with autism. Prior to her academic career, she was the senior editor at both the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation in Cleveland, Ohio and the Center for Business and Economic Research at The University of Tennessee. She holds degrees from The University of Tennessee, Kent State University, and Lehigh University. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has two sons.