Costello College of Business News

Gift from Northern Virginia entrepreneur and 22nd Century Technologies CEO Anil Sharma and his wife, Anupama, will expand opportunities for students, entrepreneurs, and the region’s innovation community.

Gabriella Lemus, a sophomore accounting major, entered Costello College of Business with a head start. Now, she’s tackling her first summer internship with that same determination to excel.

This session focuses on how the RFO will affect industry as they grapple with changing terminology, regulation vs. guidance, and how they should be thinking differently about market signals coming from the new policy

At the beginning of 2026, Mike Derrios, MBA ’06, returned home to the Costello College of Business at George Mason University as the executive director of the Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting.

When Q Miceli saw that the Costello College of Business at George Mason University was offering the Executive Mentoring Program as part of the Costello MBA, she was all in. “I had just hit a point in my career where I started supervising more people and really wanted to get some perspective,” she says.

Each month, the Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting highlights federal acquisition policy signals GovCon practitioners should not miss. This is a practical readout on how policy movement may affect the way agencies buy, how contractors compete, and where acquisition judgment matters. This brief covers July 2026.

Retail investor attention creates an incentive for firms to present earnings that satisfy investors' expectations using accounting discretion. Such a “numbers game” – the use of legally permissible accounting practices to influence reported earnings – makes investor attention an economic force influencing corporate reporting decisions, argues finance professor Lei Gao of George Mason University.

The suspension of CMMC Phase 2 should not be reduced to a win for industry or a setback for cybersecurity. It is a stress test for whether DoD can build a cyber assurance model that works in practice, not just in policy.

When Faris Madani started at George Mason University, he opted to major in economics, assuming there were limited classroom learning opportunities for someone aspiring for a career in business. It was not until he took the Survey of Accounting course with Peggy Tsirigotis, assistant accounting area chair at the Costello College of Business, that his perception began to change.

As workers enter new organizational roles, join new employers, or transition into different fields, they often experience emotional turmoil associated with changes in their professional identity. To ease the adjustment, they can train their “transition muscles” by learning from past experiences and anticipating future changes, suggests a new book chapter from George Mason University management professor Sarah Wittman.