Hitting the Mark

Faculty members earn national recognition for teaching and research.

Two Named Best in the Country

Professor Mary Benner and Senior Lecturer John Molloy were named as two of the “Top 50 Undergraduate Professors of 2020” by Poets&Quants.

Described as a “research monster,” Benner, the Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship Department chair as well as the John and Nancy Lindahl Professor for Excellence in Business Education, has nearly 9,000 Google Scholar citations, something no other professor on the list came close to matching. She brings those insights into the classroom while teaching Business Strategy and Technology Strategy for undergraduate students.

“I care about students and their learning,” Benner told Poets&Quants. “I try to create a course that allows learning for different types of students. I also have significant work experience, which helps bring the strategy topic to life.”

Benner was joined on the list by Molloy, a two-time winner of the Carlson School’s Outstanding Faculty Member Award and recipient of the Annual Faculty Teaching Award. Molloy teaches courses called Fundamentals of Finance, Financial Modeling, and Corporate Investment Decisions.

“Inspiration is tough to define since it comes in various paths,” a nominator wrote in support of Molloy. “In my instance, learning from John day in and day out became my motivation to continue on my career track in Finance. Until this date, I have not met a professor as passionate about the subject they teach. John’s empathetic nature and intriguing lectures are unparalleled at this school, and I’m sure elsewhere.”

IDS Department Earns Top Honors

Recognition of the Carlson School’s outstanding faculty continued at the INFORMS Annual Conference, considered one of the most prestigious conferences for the management information systems discipline. Two Information & Decision Sciences Department faculty members won top honors:

Practical Impact Award 
Ravi Bapna, the Curtis L. Carlson Chair in Business Analytics and Information Systems

Best IS Paper 
Associate Professor Jason Chan for Hiring Preferences in Online Labor Markets: Evidence of a Female Hiring Bias

Also, IDS PhD student Meizi Zhou won for Best Student Paper, PhD alumnae Jingjing Zhang won the Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award, and INFORMS unveiled the new ISS Gordon B. Davis Young Scholar Award. Named for the Carlson School professor emeritus, it recognizes a young scholar on a path of making outstanding intellectual contributions to the discipline.

“It was amazing to see our department have so much success,” says Gedas Adomavicius, the Information & Decision Sciences Department Chair and the Larson Endowed Chair for Excellence in Business Education. “As one of the pioneering institutions on information systems, it’s great to be able to carry on the legacy of this program.”

Another recent success for the department is a hometown grant from the Target Foundation to the Analytics for Good Institute (AGI). The grant allows AGI to continue its work on sustainable housing projects in the Twin Cities region, building on student work in the Carlson Analytics Lab.