School of Business

Matt Gerlach ’05 started in sales within the metal distribution sector right after graduation from the UCR School of Business, and as he attained a number of other sales leadership positions at varying companies, he grew ever more successful.

Manasa Savanur, a 2023 Master of Finance graduate from UCR, shared her investment expertise in a 2024 webinar, focusing on foundational topics like financial literacy, goal setting, and risk tolerance. As a senior risk analytics consultant at Wells Fargo, she bridges engineering and business teams, utilizing skills in Python, SQL, and Power BI.

During her first year at the A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management (AGSM), Camila Chaves Naranjo ’23 MBA was introduced to data analysis, “and I felt it was an area that I could have a better career,” she says. “I was passionate about the topic and ready to learn.

While shopping for cards and gifts for friends, Claire Yuan ’18 says, “I found greeting cards in stores to be plain, and I spent a lot of time looking for the right gift to pair with them. I thought if there was a product that combined both a card and gift, it would save time and make gifting more efficient.” This epiphany came while she was earning an MBA at UCR’s A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management, and she realized her classmates felt the same. “That’s when I decided to create LoveEcho Cards,” says Yuan, who is originally from Shenyang in northeast China and currently lives in

When asked when and why Mahmoud “Mike” Hemood ’20 created his Baba’s Hot Chicken restaurant, the answer begins well before it became a popular Riverside eatery: “I started Baba’s on accident. There was no intention to start a brand, I was doing it purely for fun while I finished college. My very first sale was May 8, 2019, when I was selling sandwiches out of my apartment,” says Hemood, who earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration with an emphasis in accounting at the UCR School of Business. Today, Baba’s brick-and-mortar is in the Riverside Food Lab—a food hall with many

Following clothing trends has been a lifelong passion for UCR Business alumna Jordie Katcher — one that led to her becoming vice president of Women’s Global Sport Apparel at Nike.

For Akshay Are ’24 MBA, coaching budding badminton players has been a way to share his love for the sport while helping others reach their hidden potential—on and off the court.

Based in the Seattle office of Snap Inc., MBA graduate Jinnatul Raihan Mumu ’24 is an anti-abuse analyst. “I am responsible for analyzing large data sets to identify bad actors, such as hackers, spammers, and others, and improve security defenses of the platform,” she says of her role at the company that boasts Snapchat as one of its products.