Thomas Tunstall, Ph.D.
Senior Director
Thomas Tunstall, Ph.D., became director of the Center for Community and Business Research in November 2011, where he leads a staff of economists and researchers who provide economic impact analyses, assessments, and feasibility studies on a wide variety of topics. He comes to the center with many years of experience in economic development, strategic planning, IT management and research for corporate and governmental entities, including KPMG Consulting and USAID. Tunstall’s career includes work with small businesses across the U.S. as well as international economic business development experience in Azerbaijan, Kenya, Zambia, Guam and Afghanistan. He is also the author of Outsourcing and Management (2007). Tunstall holds a doctorate in economics and public policy and an M.B.A. from the University of Texas at Dallas.
Javier Oyakawa
Javier Oyakawa is a business and economics researcher at the Center for Community and Business Research (CCBR). He studied economics at the PhD degree level at the University of Texas at Austin. He has developed research on unit roots and co-integration tests for the estimation of price elasticities in oil and gas activities, on input-output analyses of the educational and training content of the labor force in the U.S, and on computational general equilibrium models for analyzing trade and fiscal policies using statistical packages.
As part of his duties for the CCBR, he has been the lead investigator for the economic impact studies for the Eagle Ford Shale, West Texas, the San Antonio Missions, among others. He has presented papers at the Annual Conference of the Urban Affairs Association, and at the Mid-Continent Regional Science Association/IMPLAN Conference. In 2011, he was the interim Director of the CCBR, between the months of May and October of that year.
In the past, he has had administrative and financial management experience in academic and commercial institutions. He obtained a Master’s degree from Northern Illinois University and a Bachelor’s degree in economics from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). He has taught economics courses at several universities in Texas and Perú. In 2000-2001 he was full-time instructor at Trinity University in San Antonio, and in 2002 he was a full-time professor at the PUCP in Lima.
Sheryllynn Roberts, Ph.D.
Sheryllynn Roberts, Ph.D, is a business and economics researcher at the Center for Community and Business Research (CCBR). She was conferred a doctorate in Business Administration by the Department of Management from the University of Texas at Arlington, specializing in Entrepreneurship. She served as faculty at UTA, teaching Entrepreneurship and Management Process Theory from 2005 to 2012. Sheryllynn has worked extensively in the development of individual and group level behavioral learning in entrepreneurial processes, resulting in many business start-ups among her students. She has consulted with a range of nascent, start-up, mid-size, and large firms from a variety of industries.
Her research has focused on Entrepreneurial Orientation in terms of strategic process modeling, in addition to investigation of related behavioral and cognitive factors. Additional background includes organizational theory and organizational behavior, as well as examination of the parts played by rational economic and social construction strategies; a recent example of her research focuses on the ecology of crowd-fund actors and platforms.
Sheryllynn holds memberships with, reviews for, and regularly presents papers at the Academy of Management, Southern Management Academy, and United States Association of Small Business Enterprise. She has served as an organizer of the annual EO3 Professional Development Workshop for the Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division for the past six years, and has presented papers at the Babson Conference.
