Installation Ceremony 2015
Posted by Joseph Phillips, Jr. on Wednesday, November 25, 2015 at 2:48 PM PST
On November 20th we celebrated the excellent work of our faculty by installing three of our faculty members into endowed chairs and one into an endowed professorship. In recognizing these faculty members, we are, by extension, also recognizing the good work of our entire faculty.
We have the good fortune to have five endowed Chairs and five endowed professorships in the Albers School. Endowed chairs and professorships are a particularly important resource for a business school to have. They are a valuable tool for attracting and retaining outstanding faculty. If we are to attain our aspirations for academic excellence, we can only do so with a strong portfolio of endowed chairs and professorships.
Dr. Marc Cohen was installed as the fifth Genevieve Albers Professor is Marc Cohen. Marc joined the faculty in the fall of 2008. He earned a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and holds a joint appointment with our philosophy department. His academic work concerns business ethics, social contract theory, moral psychology, and more general questions in social/ political philosophy about what makes society more than an accidental crowd. The journals he has published in include the Journal of Business Ethics , Journal of Trust Research , and the Business Ethics Journal Review . Prior to joining Albers, Marc worked as vice president and corporate strategist at Branch Banking & Trust Co in North Carolina, as assistant vice president in the Bank's middle market commercial lending group, and as a management consultant at Mercer Management Consulting. Last year, he was a visiting scholar in the Department of Management, National Sun Yat Sen University in Taiwan while on sabbatical.
Dr. Lisa Zhao was installed as the third holder of the Lawrence K. Johnson Endowed Chair of Entrepreneurship. The Johnson Chair was established by alum Kent Johnson in honor of his father, and Kent was able to join us for the ceremony.
Lisa joined us this year from the University of Missouri - Kansas City, where she directed the Entrepreneurship and Innovation PhD program and taught undergraduate, MBA, PhD, and executive education courses. Before she joined UMKC, she worked at Cornell University and Michigan State University. She was also an entrepreneur and a consultant with startups and Fortune 500 companies.
Lisa conducts research and teaching on new venture product launch strategies, new venture funding and exit strategies, innovation management, market-entry strategies, and statistical methods. She is the author of more than 20 articles in top academic journals such as Strategic Management Journal , Journal of Operations Management , Journal of Management , Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice , Decision Sciences Journal , Journal of Product Innovation Management , and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management .
Dr. Jeffrey Smith was installed as the fourth holder of the Frank Shrontz Endowed Chair of Professional Ethics. Shrontz is the former CEO of Boeing and was able to join us for the celebration.
Jeffrey joined us this year from the University of Redlands, where he spent twelve years and served as the founding Director of the Banta Center for Business, Ethics and Society. He currently serves on the Executive Board of the Society for Business Ethics and will assume its Presidency in 2017.
His research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy and business, currently focusing on the philosophical dimensions of corporate responsibility, examining whether recent calls for greater social involvement by corporations can be given a moral foundation, political foundation, or some combination of both. Jeffrey's work has been published in journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly , Ethical Theory and Moral Practice , and the Journal of Business Ethics , and he is the co-author of the forthcoming 8th edition of Ethics and the Conduct of Business .
We also installed Dr. Peter Brous as the third holder of the Dr. Khalil Dibee Endowed Chair in Finance. Peter also was the first holder of the chair back in 2007 to 2011. Dibee was a long time member of our finance faculty.
Peter joined Seattle University in 1992, after four years on the faculty at Pennsylvania State University. He has published articles in the top finance and accounting journals, including the Journal of Finance , Journal of Financial Economics , Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis , and the Journal of Accounting Research . At the same time, Peter has published several pedagogical papers in the Journal of Financial Education . He has taught on-site finance courses at Costco Wholesale Corporation and has served as an expert witness in over 30 cases based on his expertise in valuing employee stock options or business valuation. Additional areas of expertise include corporate performance measures, capital budgeting, corporate financing decisions, and real option analysis.
It was great to be able to recognize these faculty members for their outstanding work! Please join me in congratulating them!