Our People
R. David Ramsey, PhD, CPA
e-mail: rdramsey@teamcpa.com
Richard David Ramsey joined Bruce Harrell & Company in September 2000. Dr. Ramsey has over 30 years of experience in education, the military, and business and industry. He is Director of the Internet Resource Center, Professor of General Business, and Samuel Moore Walton Fellow in the College of Business & Technology at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. He has been on the business faculty, including the MBA faculty, at Southeastern since 1981 and was formerly an Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University and Research Technical Communicator for Halliburton Services.
Dr. Ramsey --- who goes by his middle name, David --- is married and is father of two bilingual Swedish-English children in Hammond, Louisiana. He passed the CPA Exam in 1997 and is a member of the Louisiana Society of CPAs, serving on the Society's Computer Education Committee. At Bruce Harrell & Company, David primarily works in the firm’s Business Services Unit (BSU) and as a consultant with the firm’s Governmental Results Systems, LLC affilate (GRS).
A 1965 alumnus of Hammond High School, David received his Ph.D. in Communication from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, in 1980. His academic qualifications include an M.A. in linguistics from the University of Leeds (England), where he studied as a Fellow of the Rotary International Foundation, and an M.A. in English from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He was valedictorian of the Class of 1968 at Southeastern Louisiana University. He holds a Certificate of Swedish Language from Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden. He is a graduate of the U.S. Navy Supply Corps School and the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.
During the Vietnam conflict David was Disbursing Officer on USS Berkeley (DDG 15) in Naval Gunfire Support, and he is now an officer in the 415th Military Intelligence Battalion (Linguist) of the Louisiana Army National Guard. He speaks French and Swedish in addition to English and has traveled in 31 countries on four continents. David was first introduced to the study of computers during his tour in the Navy, and now he teaches on-line courses and supervises three computer labs with 125 workstations and a crew of lab assistants. Among the many courses he has taught are business communication, technical writing, survey of management, principles of marketing, student success, international business, and microcomputer applications.
David is author of over 100 publications, mostly on business topics, and has given presentations in numerous states and in Europe. In 1984 he was Coordinator of the Southeast Convention of the Association for Business Communication. He is currently Book Review Editor for the International Journal of Commerce and Management (a publication of the International Academy of Business Disciplines) and serves on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. He is a member of Phi Kappa Phi, the Hammond Chamber of Commerce, numerous professional and academic societies, and the Tangipahoa Parish Board of Election Supervisors. He is active in various civic organizations and church affairs.
Since 1988 David has coached Southeastern Louisiana University student teams in the Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) competitions. His teams have won 25 regional and national awards, most of them for projects on the economic effects of illiteracy. These awards include two National Finalist citations in the annual Make A Difference Day competition sponsored by SIFE in collaboration with USA Weekend.
He and his wife met in 1980 over a cup of tea in England when he was working there for the Whitby International Centre and she came there to practice her English, intending to learn to speak like the Queen. Her only knowledge of Louisiana before then was that it is the source of Tabasco, from the label on the little bottle of pepper sauce on her kitchen table in Sweden. The first Swedish immigrant to Hammond was Peter of Hammerdal, who founded Hammond, Louisiana, in 1817, the first recorded case of permanent Swedish migration to the Deep South; the second Swedish immigrant to Hammond was David's wife, Birgitta Ramsey, who arrived 165 years later.
