Standing on StrengthTIPs Off and Running
Vanderbilt business faculty are working with other Vanderbilt colleagues in three projects selected for the initial set of awards from Vanderbilt’s Trans-Institutional Program.
The TIPs initiative supports cross-disciplinary research and collaboration, a core pillar of the university’s Academic Strategic Plan. TIPs applicants were encouraged to identify projects that only could be pursued through collaboration and that still may be in the incubation phase.
The three TIPs programs involving Owen faculty are:
Vanderbilt Institute for Obesity and Metabolism
Owen Faculty: Kelly Haws, Associate Professor or Marketing
Collaborating Schools: College of Arts and Science, School of Law, Peabody College, Owen, School of Medicine
The team will examine what can create real behavioral change that leads to intervention in—and ultimately prevention of—the nationwide epidemic of obesity.
A Multidisciplinary Approach to Assessing Health Care in Brazil
Owen Faculty: Bart Victor, the Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership
Collaborating Schools: College of Arts and Science, Owen, School of Medicine
The researchers will look at the effectiveness of health care beyond the clinical to determine how it impacts Brazilian society in multiple ways.
Private Governance Approaches to Climate Change
Owen Faculty: Mark Cohen, the Justin Potter Professor of Competitive Enterprise
Collaborating Schools: College of Arts and Science, Owen, School of Law
Drawing on research in law, social psychology, economics and behavioral science, the interdisciplinary team investigates battling climate change by focusing on nongovernment solutions.
Expanding Diversity
The Owen School has partnered with Management Leadership for Tomorrow to help attract more minority MBA students and support them through school and in their careers.
MLT is a nonprofit organization that assists talented black, Hispanic and Native American men and women succeed at each career stage and advance to senior leadership. It will work with prospective Vanderbilt MBA students, as well as first- and second-year students.
Vanderbilt joins Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Wharton School and other top MBA programs working with MLT.
MLT says that despite representing 30 percent of the U.S. population, black, Hispanic and Native Americans hold just 6 percent of the top entry-level business jobs, represent 8 percent of students enrolled at top 50 MBA programs and hold just 3 percent of all senior executive positions at corporations, nonprofits and entrepreneurial ventures.
Latin American Recognition
Vanderbilt MBA ranked No. 10 among U.S. schools in this year’s American Economia ranking (No. 21 globally, up from No. 30 last year). The ranking methodology takes into account four components: academic strength, selectivity, networking power for Latin Americans and cost benefit. American Economia is Latin America’s top business magazine.
Wanted: More Women in Business
Vanderbilt joined 45 top business schools at the White House Aug. 5 to announce efforts to help women succeed in business school and throughout their careers.
The Vanderbilt team, led by Associate Dean Nancy Lea Hyer, collaborated with other business schools to develop a set of best practices designed to advance women in business.
Dean Eric Johnson attended the White House meeting and committed Vanderbilt to the new best practices document.
- The best practices grew out of discussions among business school deans. They focus on four key areas:
- Ensuring access to business schools and business careers
- Building a business school experience that prepares students for the workforce of tomorrow
- Ensuring career services that go beyond the needs of traditional students
- Exemplifying how organizations should be run
Strength in Teaching and Scholarship
Professors Tae-Youn Park and Richard Willis have received Dean’s Awards for Excellence in Research. The school awards are given annually in recognition for outstanding research contributions.
Park, assistant professor of management, received the award for his recent work on the organizational consequences of compensation, human capital theory and employee-organization relationships. Willis, the Anne Marie and Thomas B. Walker Jr. Professor of Accounting, received the award for his recent articles examining financial analysts as information intermediaries in capital markets.
Professors David Owens and Rangaraj Ramanujam have been awarded Dean’s Awards for Teaching and Learning. These teaching awards are given annually to recognize individuals for contributions both inside and outside the classroom. Owens, professor for the practice of management and innovation, was recognized for his work with massive open online courses through Coursera and the use of that technology to flip the traditional classroom. More than 100,000 students have enrolled in Owens’ course during the past two years and he is now integrating the online material into both the MBA and Executive MBA programs.
Ramanujam, professor of management, received the award for his innovative course design of Organizational Learning and Effectiveness. The timely course provides an actionable understanding of the personal and collective capabilities for deliberate learning. He has taken an experiential learning approach, focusing students on the importance of learning to learn. Both professors received high marks from students.
Welcome Professor Munyan
Benjamin Munyan has joined Vanderbilt as assistant professor of management. His research interests include financial intermediation, banking and shadow banking, government regulation and fixed income markets. His job market paper “Regulatory Arbitrage in Repo Markets,” was a finalist for the Arthur Warga Award for Best Paper in Fixed Income at the 2015 Society for Financial Studies Cavalcade conference. Munyan earned a bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University and his doctorate at the Robert H. Smith School at the University of Maryland, where he was the recipient of the Frank T. Paine Award for Academic Achievement. During graduate school, Munyan worked at the U.S. Treasury Office of Financial Research, where he helped analyze money market funds and fixed income markets.
Chairman of the Year
Congratulations to former dean James Bradford for being named the Non-Executive Chairman of the Year by the New York Stock Exchange Governance Services. Bradford, JD’73, professor for the practice of management at the Owen School, was honored for his role as chairman of the board of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc. Eligible candidates for the award include chairmen of publicly traded companies in the United States that are listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ.