New Appointments to Professorships and Chairs

06/24/2010

The Carlson School recently announced eight new appointments to professorships and two new appointments to chairs in recognition of the recipients' excellence in research, teaching and service contributions, international reputation, and evidence of impact. The appointments will go into effect on July 1, 2010.

"Chairs and professorships are the highest honor we can present to our most valuable faculty members," says Dean Alison Davis-Blake. "These named positions are truly reflective of the high quality of our faculty and give us the ability to recruit and retain the best researchers who deliver at an outstanding level in the classroom, in professional service, and in community outreach. The Carlson School is truly grateful to be home to these distinguished individuals."

Carlson School chairs and professorships now number 35.

Through the generous efforts of the Carlson School's Board of Overseers, two new professorships have been created, to which the following faculty members have been appointed:

Associate Professor Ravi Bapna (PhD, University of Connecticut), Information and Decision Sciences
Board of Overseers Professor of Information and Decision
Bapna's research interests are in the areas of economics of information systems, online auctions, e-market design, grid computing, and the design of the IT organization. He serves as an associate editor for MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research, is the co-chair of the Workshop on Information Systems Economics, regularly serves on program committees of major international IS conferences and workshops, and is a member of the Nasscomm Innovation Institute, a think-tank to foster innovation in the Indian IT/ITeS industry.

Professor Michelle Duffy (PhD, University of Arkansas), Human Resources and Industrial Relations
Board of Overseers Professor of Human Resources and Industrial Relations
Duffy's research interests include antisocial behavior at work with a special focus on factors that trigger this behavior. She has also conducted research examining the role of emotions and affective dispositions in employee and organizational well-being and functioning. Duffy has won teaching awards at the University of Minnesota, University of Kentucky, and the University of Arkansas. She is currently a representative-at-large (elected) for the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management.

The following faculty members were newly appointed to chairs and professorships:

Professor Chris Nachtsheim (PhD, University of Minnesota), Operations and Management Sciences
The Frank Donaldson Chair in Operations Management
Nachtsheim's teaching and research interests center on the optimal design of industrial experiments, regression and predictive modeling, and quality management. He served as examiner, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1996, is a two-time recipient of the Brumbaugh Award of the ASQ for best paper published in the area of industrial quality control, and was the recipient of a ASME (CAE/CAD/ CAM) National Best Paper Award. He has served as staff member in the Statistics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and as senior statistician at General Mills.

Professor John Boyd (PhD, University of Pennsylvania), Finance
The Banking Industry of Minnesota Chair
Boyd's primary research interests include banking, financial intermediation, intermediation and development, and the economics of gun ownership. He recently (June 2010) visited the Central Bank of Hungary (Magyar Nemzeti Bank) as a policy consultant, and has been or is consultant to the United States Treasury, Council of Economic Advisers, Federal Home Loan Banks, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Federal Reserve System, various banking and trade associations, and has testified before the United States Congress.

Professor Rohini Ahluwalia (PhD, Ohio State University), Marketing and Logistics Management
The Curtis L. Carlson Trust Professor of Marketing
Ahluwalia's current work focuses on two streams of research: to understand how people process, resist, and are influenced by counter-attitudinal and negative information (relating to both brands and political candidates); and branding issues, such as brand loyalty and brand "stretchability." She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Consumer Research, serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Consumer Psychology, and has been named as a co-chair of the 2011 Association for Consumer Research Conference.

Associate Professor Gedas Adomavicius (PhD, New York University), Information and Decision Sciences
The Carolyn I. Anderson Professor in Business Education Excellence
Adomavicius' research interests include personalization technologies, customer relationship management, knowledge discovery and data mining, and e-commerce technologies. His current research deals with multidimensional recommender systems and novel techniques for customer modeling. He has published in several leading academic journals, including "Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery" and "IEEE Computer." He teaches an MBA course on Internet Technologies.

Associate Professor Zhaoyang Gu (PhD, Tulane University), Accounting
The Honeywell Professor of Accounting
Gu's main interests are in capital market-based empirical accounting research including analyst and management forecasts, earnings management, and valuation use of accounting information in the equity and debt markets. He has been invited to present his research at numerous conferences and academic institutions and has won the Weil Prize in research at Carnegie Mellon University and the best paper award at the 9th World Congress of International Association of Accounting Educators and Researchers. He also regularly serves as a referee for top academic journals.

Associate Professor Stephen Parente (PhD, Johns Hopkins University), Finance
The Minnesota Insurance Industry Professor of Health Finance and Insurance
Parente specializes in health economics, information technology, and health insurance. He's also the director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota. He has been the principal investigator funded studies on consumer directed health plans since 2002, was a health policy advisor for the McCain 2008 Presidential Campaign, and served as Legislative Fellow in the office of Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV) in 1992/93.

Associate Professor Pervin Shroff (PhD, Columbia University), Accounting
The Carl L. Nelson Professor of Accounting
Shroff 's research focuses on the role of accounting information in capital markets with particular emphasis on accounting-based valuation and estimation of risk. She has also researched issues relating to earnings management, accounting conservatism, impact of accounting regulation, role of financial intermediaries and corporate finance issues. She has taught financial accounting at the undergraduate and MBA levels and has served as the academic director of the Carlson Growth Fund. She also teaches in the Global Executive MBA programs.

Associate Professor Kathleen Vohs (PhD, Dartmouth College), Marketing and Logistics Management
Vohs has been appointed to a professorship, which will go into effect in summer 2011, after the McKnight Presidential Fellowship she holds ends. At that time, the specific named position that Professor Vohs will hold will be identified. Voh's research is concerned with the psychological effects of being reminded of money; self-regulation, particularly in regards to impulsive spending and eating; making choices; the fear and feeling of being duped; and self-escape behaviors. She is a recipient of Dartmouth's Hannah T. Croasdale Graduate Study Award, the MENSA Award for Research in Excellence, the SAGE Young Scholars Award given by Sage Publications and the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Early Career Award by the Society of Self and Identity.