Jill Jolley
Lecturer in Organizational Behavior
Jill grew up near the University of Michigan campus. Her youth involved social aspects of campus life and attending events from music and art to business offerings at the university's graduate business school.
Jill is a third-generation MBA academic faculty member, following her father, who taught at Michigan, and grandfather, who taught at Harvard. Her mother and grandmother were teachers.
Exploring different career paths, Jill left Merrill Lynch to join Charles Schwab & Co. in its early days as a small private company. She spent 13 years at Schwab, rising from broker in Sunnyvale, California, to regional director for Maine to Virginia, excluding New York City's metro area and Long Island.
After her early career success, Jill left the corporate world to earn an MBA from Simmons University in Boston. She had her youngest of three children weeks after graduating. To balance family and career, she started a consulting business assisting small social venture startups with growth challenges. She then shifted to construction management for residential and a public airport terminal seismic retrofit project.
Ultimately, Jill became an academic at California State University Monterey Bay's College of Business.
In 2018, she earned a Ph.D. in business administration with a management concentration from National University. Her dissertation gathered insights from neurodiverse workers about successful work experiences and what managers did to support them appropriately amid challenges neurodiverse workers face in traditional workplaces. When her empirical studies began in 2011, neurodiversity awareness was limited, and capabilities of neurodiverse adults were widely misunderstood.
Although Jill continues as a neurodiversity workplace consultant and researcher, she embraces how artificial intelligence enhances access and success for neurodiverse adults in interesting workplaces. She also researches evolving management theory in changing organizational environments.
Jill joined Rice University in 2022, teaching the Power and Influence class created by Dr. Jonathan Miles. She is married with adult children and a granddaughter and fosters rescue Labrador retrievers when not traveling North America with her husband, who works in entertainment.