The New Faculty Faces At The Top Business Schools

BIG HIRES FROM OTHER B-SCHOOLS

In this year’s faculty hiring carousel, many schools made good on some changes. Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management also had arguably one of the biggest hires this year in Christopher Marquis as the Samuel C. Johnson Professor of Sustainable Global Enterprise. Marquis was a catch from the beginning when his PhD dissertation received the 2006 William H. Newman Award for best dissertation across the entire Academy of Management. After earning his PhD from the University of Michigan, Marquis spent nearly a decade at Harvard Business School, where he moved up to associate professor of business administration. Before academia, Marquis had been a VP at JPMorgan Chase. Cornell Johnson was also able to lure Li Chen, a former associate professor at Duke Fuqua for seven years.

MIT Sloan was able to land Erin Kelly, who after graduating with a PhD from Princeton in 2000 had spent 15 years in the University of Minnesota’s sociology department. She also taught at the graduate level for Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. An industry leader, her major research and work is in discriminatory policies in U.S. workplaces.

NYU’s Stern School of Business also got in on the action, hiring two Andrew Patton from Duke Fuqua and Petra Moser from the GSB. Both have more than a decade of teaching experience and have also taught at the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, and MIT Sloan.

Carnegie Mellon Tepper’s big hire from another top school was Kathryn Barraclough, who left Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management. Barraclough directed the MS in finance program at Owen and will be the Distinguished Service Professor of Finance and head of the MBA program at Tepper.

COMPETITION STIFF FOR ‘ENTRY LEVEL’ HIRES, TOO

Snagging newbie faculty members as they leave their PhD programs also comes with fierce competition between schools. “A lot,” Phillips says, matter-of-factly, when asked how much competition exists between schools for the best graduating PhDs. “There’s a lot of competition. The business school has a lot of different fields in it—marketing, management, economics, finance, etcetera—and the search process is a long process.”

Phillips explains that every different field within a school has a different process but one common theme remains the same—if you’re a top graduating PhD student, you’re a hot commodity. “People do multiple job talks and have multiple job offers,” Phillips claims. “You’re competing with other schools for the people you think are going to be the best fit for your institution.”

An indicator of this is when schools like North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School snatch up top talent before they even graduate. This fall, Kenan-Flagler has three faculty members in classrooms finishing their PhDs—two from Wharton and one from UNC’s communications department—that will be made assistant professors when they complete their PhDs in December, Kenan-Flagler says.

Indeed, as the charts on the following pages show, many schools are hiring top graduating PhDs from other blue chip b-schools. However, many would admit to non-traditional paths of trials and errors to the campuses they now call home.

FROM CRUSTACEANS TO CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

Although the summer study as a high school student, examining crustaceans in a Duke University lab seems unrelated to b-school curriculum, it set Anik down an inevitable path. “I enjoyed the research part of it,” she recalls of the experience. “It was a lot of curiosity and a lot of asking questions. Why do the animals behave this way? Why do they have these migration patterns? Why are some eggs colored differently than others?”

Anik liked behaviors. But she “randomly” thought she’d like studying human behaviors better. She wanted to learn more about why living things do what they do. So she moved to the United States to study psychology (and swim) at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. That led to a summer job setting up the behavioral lab at London Business School, after her sophomore year with renowned marketing professor, Nader Tavassoli.

“I wanted to ask the questions he was asking,” Anik states. “That was the turning point in college. He looked at consumer behavior and marketing and I realized that is how I wanted to spend my life.”

After a doctorate from Harvard Business School and a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, Anik is now asking those questions. She’s also helping some brilliant minds think about solving them.

For tables listing new graduate-level faculty members, education and teaching experience at the top b-schools, see the following pages. It should be noted, visiting professors and lecturers were not included. Many schools also reported high amounts of visiting professors this year, which would significantly impact these numbers.

Stanford GSB

Harvard Business School

Wharton & Chicago Booth

Columbia Business School & Northwestern Kellogg

MIT Sloan, Dartmouth Tuck & Duke Fuqua

Berkeley-Haas & Michigan Ross

Yale SOM, Virginia Darden & UCLA Anderson

Cornell Johnson & NYU Stern

Carnegie Mellon Tepper, UNC Kenan-Flagler & Emory Goizueta

Georgetown McDonough, Washington Foster, Washington Olin & Vanderbilt Owen