Sheryl B. Ball Professor Cognitive Wireless Technology Virginia Tech

Biographical Sketch

Sheryl B. Ball received the B.A. (with honors) in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences and Economics, the M.S. in Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences, and the Ph.D. in Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences from Northwestern University in 1984, 1986, and 1991, respectively. She joined Virginia Tech in 1992 and has also taught at other universities including Northwestern University?s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Indiana University School of Business, Boston University of School of Management and Babson College. Dr. Ball has served as the Career Advisor for the Department of Economics and, beginning 1999, as the Director of the Department?s undergraduate program.

Dr. Ball?s research is in game theory. With Catherine Eckel, she recently received a National Science Foundation grant to study how people?s social status affects how they fare in economic situations. She is also involved with research in wireless telecommunication through the Center for Wireless Telecommunications (CWT). Dr. Ball was involved in the planning and actual bidding for the Virginia Tech Foundation?s acquisition of local multipoint distribution services (LMDS) licenses in four basic trading areas in 1998. Virginia Tech was the first University in the country to buy an FCC license in an auction.

She has also been a co-principal investigator on two projects sponsored by Hughes Telecommunications and Space through the CWT. One project investigated FCC auction rules and the strategies which were used in Direct Broadcast Satellite(DBS) auctions and the likelihood that future DBS national and international licenses would be awarded by auction. In a second follow-on project, Dr. Ball was part of a team that developed an auction simulator. Her contribution to the project was writing the strategies used by the simulated opponents and translating FCC auction rules into a programmable environment.

Contact Information

• Email: sball@vt.edu