About Us
Vision
Organizational Excellence serves as the trusted internal consulting partner to university leaders as they seek to bring about meaningful change, achieve overall excellence in their respective areas and across the university, and make significant progress toward strategic goals.
Mission
Organizational Excellence serves to guide, facilitate, enable, and foster strategic organizational development and improvement initiatives that are of high-importance and value to the institution.
Values
The work of Organizational Excellence is guided by the principle of Virginia Tech’s motto – Ut Prosim (That I May Serve). In service of our motto, we:
- Build authentic and trusting relationships in all of our work.
- Leverage diverse and deep institutional understanding to further organizational excellence in all its forms.
- Embrace curiosity, collaboration, and open-minded exploration in our work.
- Take a holistic and inclusive approach to understanding needs and exploring solutions.
- Drive work that will thrive within the holistic system of our university.
Meet the Team
Yena Cho, Graduate Student Intern
Yena is a second-year PhD student in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Her research interests include work-life balance, workplace stress, and recovery. Her proposed thesis examines social media breaks during work hours, exploring their dual impact: enhancing work focus by offering a break from work demands while potentially hindering focus by introducing an overload of information.
Yasmine Elfeki, Graduate Student Intern
Yasmine is a fourth year Industrial/Organizational Psychology PhD student. Her research interests include gender and leadership perceptions. She explores the experiences and the perceptions of individuals with stigmatized social identities, such as women and minorities in leadership. She has a Masters degree in international human resource management. Last semester she defended her I/O psychology Masters thesis, on stereotype threat effects on women leaders’ performance, and the buffering role of positive gender identity.
Kristina Givens, Process Improvement Senior Consultant
Kristina brings over 30 years of professional experience within a variety of industries. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, she spent over 12 years within the hospital setting primarily focusing efforts, in alignment with the strategic initiative, as an educator and leader directing the adaptation and application of Lean methodology, principles, and concepts as a structured approach to managing rapid change and strengthening the culture of continuous improvement.
Amy Hogan, Managing Consultant
Amy has over 25 years of experience in leadership and organizational development, and has held leadership roles in these areas across multiple industries. A proud Hokie alum having served the Virginia Tech community for over 15 years, she brings expertise in leadership development, organizational development, change management, and strategic visioning and planning.
Rob Knee, Senior Consultant
Rob has over a decade of experience in organizational change and readiness across public and private sectors throughout North America. As a Hokie alum, he is excited to share his expertise in change management, leadership and culture development, and strategic change as a partner to support the ongoing development and transformation taking place across Virginia Tech
Siyi Liu, Graduate Student Intern
Siyi is a second-year PhD student in Industrial/Organizational Psychology with a strong interest in interdisciplinary research, particularly at the intersection of AI and psychology. Her work focuses on applying large language models to interview scoring and leveraging machine learning and natural language processing to automate mental-state coding. She holds a Master’s degree in Finance from the University of Maryland. This year, she submitted a first-author paper to Organizational Research Methods and is currently working on her thesis.
Lars Schmidt, Associate Consultant
Lars brings over 5 years of experience within a variety of industries across Europe and the public sector in Germany. Before starting at Virginia Tech, he worked in management and technology consulting in Germany primarily focusing on organizational and digital transformation. Joining Hokie Nation, Lars will contribute with his expertise in organizational change management, reorganization and development of departments as well as process improvement to Hokie Nation.