Five faculty members honored with awards

At the September meeting of the Freeman School faculty, Dean Ira Solomon announced the recipients of five awards honoring professors for outstanding teaching, research and service.

The Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award was established in 2012 to recognize faculty members who are outstanding instructors and whose teaching aligns with the strategic objectives of the school. The award – which is presented at both the graduate and undergraduate levels – is based on several criteria, including student evaluations, the level to which the faculty member integrates academic research into his or her teaching, and the extent to which the course provides high-impact experiential learning opportunities for students.

This year’s winner of the Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award for Graduate Education is Geoffrey Parker. Parker, the Norman Mayer Professor of Business and professor of management science, joined the Freeman School in 1998 and was promoted to full professor in 2011. He is co-developer of the economic theory of two-sided networks, and his research explores the economics of and strategy of platform markets. In the classroom, Parker teaches Process Modeling and Technology Integration, Modeling and Analytics, and Platform Strategy, a course based in large part on his own research. He currently serves as research director of the Tulane Energy Institute and is a research fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business and president of the Industry Studies Association.

The Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award for Undergraduate Education was presented to Kris Hoang. An assistant professor of accounting, Hoang joined the Freeman School in 2012 after earning her PhD from the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on judgment and decision-making in corporate governance and audit settings, and her teaching emphasizes the role of accounting information in management decision-making and strategy. The Dean's Excellence in Teaching Award is Hoang’s third teaching award this year. In the spring, Hoang received both the FSG Teaching Award, presented by the Freeman Student Government Executive Board, and the BSM Howard W. Wissner Award, selected by a vote of the undergraduate student body.

Established in 2012, the Dean’s Excellence in Intellectual Contribution Award was created to honor professors of practice and lecturers who have produced outstanding scholarly contributions. This year’s award went to Peter Ricchiuti. The William B. Burkenroad Jr. Professor of Practice in Finance, Ricchiuti began teaching at the Freeman School in 1986 and has served the school in variety of roles, including assistant dean and director of the Career Management Center. In 1993, he founded Burkenroad Reports, a student equities research program that has earned national accolades and helped place hundreds of students in finance positions. In 2014, Ricchiuti published his first book, Stocks Under Rocks: How To Uncover Overlooked, Profitable Market Opportunities (FT Press), an investing guide based on lessons he’s learned over the years as director of Burkenroad Reports.

Dean Solomon also announced a new award at the meeting. The Dean’s Award for Faculty Excellence was established to honor faculty members for outstanding overall performance. The award, presented each year at the discretion of the dean, recognizes professors who have exhibited sustained, exceptional performance in teaching, research and service. The inaugural recipients of the award are Michael Burke and Sheri Tice.

Burke, the Lawrence Martin Chair in Business and professor of management, joined the Freeman School in 1991 and holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences in Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. One of the nation’s leading experts on worker safety training, Burke’s research focuses on learning and the efficacy of workplace safety and health interventions as well as the meaning of employee perceptions of work environment characteristics (psychological and organizational climate) and statistical procedures for assessing inter-rater agreement. Burke has chaired 34 dissertation committees and served as a member on an additional 51 committees at the Freeman School, the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and the Department of Psychology. He also recently completed a term as chair of Tulane University’s Social Behavioral Institutional Review Board as is now serving as  Management Area Coordinator at the Freeman School.

Tice, the A. B. Freeman Chair of Business and professor of finance, joined the Freeman School in 1998 and was promoted to full professor in 2010. Her research focuses on corporate finance and the effect of firm characteristics on the decisions and performance of firms and their competitors. In the classroom, Tice supervises and teaches the Darwin Fenner Student Managed Fund course, an honors seminar in which students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels read current scholarly research on value investing and manage three portfolios totaling over $3.8 million in Freeman School endowment funds. Tice also serves as faculty director of the Master of Finance program and recently concluded a term as Finance Area Coordinator.

“One of the joys of serving as dean is the ability to recognize excellence in one’s colleagues, and these five faculty members clearly deserve recognition,” said Dean Solomon. “I would be remiss, however, if I failed to note that selecting these individuals was anything but easy because excellence resides broadly within the Freeman School faculty.”