Barry Karafin
Senior Lecturer

Barry Karafin is the Senior Lecturer in Business Strategy at the University of South Florida. Prior to joining the USF faculty in 2002, he was a Visiting Professor at Rutgers University Business School for six years, and before that he had been Vice President, Marketing and Strategic Planning, Lucent Technologies. In the latter role, he was involved in the management of major change, including turnarounds, at several Lucent business units. Dr. Karafin had been at Lucent, and AT&T before it, for 34 years, having had assignments in R&D (Bell Labs) and Operations, as well as in Marketing and Strategic Planning.

Dr Karafin holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and undergraduate and Masters degrees in Electrical Engineering from Penn and NYU respectively.

At USF he has taught in the MBA programs as well as in the undergraduate school. He received the award of Outstanding Professor from the student body in 2003.

At Rutgers he taught in both the Engineering and Business Schools at all levels including International Executive MBA programs in China and Singapore, where he was twice recognized by students as the “top professor.” The EMBA Strategy program he designed and taught for several years was recognized by Business Week as one of the five top such programs in the United States.

Dr. Karafin also does general business consulting in the areas of business and market planning, operations, organizational design and management, and technology strategy and management. His clients have included Adobe Systems, AT&T, FCCI, Honeywell, Kodak, Lucent Technologies, Thomson-CSF and a number of Technology start-ups.