Faculty News
 
Amar Cheema • Amar Cheema was featured in a Dec. 6, 2011, MarketWatch article titled “Tips for Increasing Your Savings Success.” The article discusses research by Cheema and University of Southern California Marshall School of Business Professor Gulden Ulkumen that suggests that the way a person thinks makes a big difference in how he or she should approach saving goals. Cheema also had a coauthored paper accepted for publication in Journal of Consumer Research, titled “Is Noise Always Bad? Exploring the Effects of Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition” and had two coauthored papers published in late 2011: “Framing Goals to Influence Personal Savings: The Role of Specificity and Construal Level” (Journal of Marketing Research, December 2011) and “Earmarking and Partitioning: Increasing Saving by Low-Income Households” (Journal of Marketing Research, Special Interdisciplinary Issue on Consumer Financial Decision Making, November 2011). The forthcoming article was featured in The Wall Street Journal Ideas Market blog Feb. 22, 2012 in a blog entry titled “A Creative Buzz.”
 

Photo by Wesley Wey (McIntire ’13). Rich DeMong • Rich DeMong’s last day of teaching the McIntire School’s third-year core curriculum, ICE, was Dec. 6, 2011. Although DeMong officially retired in May 2010, he continued to teach ICE courses during the fall. Students in Blocks 1 and 2 presented DeMong a framed photo of him with the students, as well as a poster of a “risk/reward” graph (one of DeMong’s favorite teaching tools) that the students had all autographed. Says Professor Lynn Hamilton, “It was a very special moment that spoke so highly of our students and their admiration of Rich.”

 

Rebecca Leonard • Rebecca Leonard traveled to Haiti in January 2012 with a team from Rivanna Community Church in Charlottesville as part of an ongoing relationship Grace Network USA has with L’Eglise Baptiste Siloe in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Teams from this network of churches have been traveling to Haiti for the past 30 years, providing support to the church, medical care, and leadership development, and more recently by helping to rebuild the homes and lives that were affected by the earthquake of 2010. While in Port-au-Prince, the team conducted three days of medical clinics and visited a new development, Canaan (The Promised Land). Third-year Leadership minor and biochemistry major Jean Mary Aubourg (A&S ’13), who had not been to Haiti since the age of 16, accompanied the group as a translator and conducted observatory research for his leadership minor practicum. Second-year College student Nicholas Braun (A&S ’14) and third-year Commerce student Ania Turnier (McIntire ’13), both native Haitian, also joined the group and helped as translators in the clinic.

Ryan Nelson • Ryan Nelson participated for the first time in a January-term class in Argentina titled “Systems Case Studies in Argentina.” Led by Nelson and Engineering Professor Reid Bailey, two dozen students in this joint offering of the McIntire School and the Engineering School ventured to Mendoza, Argentina, to work on consulting projects at two local wineries. At the end of the two weeks, student consulting teams delivered written reports and presentations to their clients. Says Nelson, “This international, interdisciplinary, experiential class was one of the best learning experiences I have ever participated in during my 25+ years of teaching!” Read blog entries from the students.

Patrik Sandas • Patrik Sandas is a Research Affiliate to the Swedish Institute for Financial Research, based in Stockholm, during the period Jan. 1, 2012 to Dec. 31, 2014. Sandas previously held a visiting professorship with SIFR, the Olof Stenhammar Visiting Professorship in Financial Entrepreneurship.

Phil Shane • A research paper coauthored by Phil Shane and titled “Do Financial Analysts’ Long-Term Growth Forecasts Matter? Evidence from Stock Recommendations and Career Outcomes” is forthcoming in Journal of Accounting & Economics.

Bill Shenkir • The board of directors of Children, Youth & Family Services, a local 91-year-old nonprofit, named the board room in its new facility for Bill Shenkir, who chaired the nonprofit’s successful $2 million three-year capital campaign.

David C. Smith • Steven M. Davidoff, writing as The Deal Professor for The New York Times’ DealBook, discussed whether the current attacks against the private equity industry are warranted and leads with research by David C. Smith and colleagues in a Jan. 24, 2012, column titled “Amid Attacks on Private Equity, Efforts to Study Its Value.”

Bob Webb • Bob Webb gave the keynote address, “Trading and Fat Tails,” at the Auckland Finance Meeting, which was held at the Auckland University of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand, in December 2011. Webb also completed his last teaching semester at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) Graduate School of Finance last December as part of his three-year joint appointment. While at KAIST, he gave a presentation on “The Economic Impact of Taxing Carbon” at the Green Finance International Seminar on Sustainable Finance in November. Webb was interviewed about financial markets by The Chosunilbo, a leading Korean newspaper, Nov. 9, 2011. He was also featured in a news article by MK News Oct. 3, 2011, that reported on his trading class at KAIST.

Mark White • A coauthored paper by Mark White, “Will Algae Produce the Green? Using Published Life Cycle Assessments as a Starting Point for Economic Evaluation of Future Algae-to-Energy Systems,” will be published in the March 2012 issue of Biofuels Perspectives. This article continues the authors’ investigation into the environmental and financial impacts of using algae as an alternative fuel source.

Barb Wixom • Barb Wixom will co-chair the Business Intelligence Congress 3 in Orlando, Fla., Dec. 15 and 16, 2012, to continue work on aligning academic analytics efforts with the needs of practice. Through 2012, Wixom is serving as an associated researcher for the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Information Systems Research on a project titled “Working Smarter: Seizing the Opportunities in Working with Ubiquitous Data.” In addition, Wixom won an IBM grant to fund her research on the topic of “The Role of Analytics in Mergers and Acquisitions.”

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