DIVERSITY IN EXPERTISE, DISCIPLINES, AND BACKGROUNDS
2024’s honored professors come from a wide range of expertise, disciplines, and backgrounds.
Our youngest winners – Tommy Pan Fang of Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business and Charlie Hannigan of USC Marshall – are just 30 years old.
Fang is the first Rice professor on our list of best undergraduate professors mainly because, well, Rice didn’t have an undergraduate business program before 2021. Its first undergraduate cohort graduated this May.
Tommy Pan Fang
“While I enjoyed all of my professors, Dr. Tommy Pan Fang stood out as the most engaging, thought-provoking, and intelligent. In his course, Strategic Management, I consistently found myself tying in previous and current concepts from class into the cases we reviewed during our discussion. I felt excited to participate,” says student Paul Gregory who will graduate with the class of 2026.
Hannigan garnered more nominations than any other professor on this year’s list – 109 to be precise. The Assistant Professor in Data Sciences and Operations is currently researching ways people who are incarcerated as their case winds through courts can actually spend more time in jail than their ultimate sentence. He’s using “clever math” to help detangle the incentives for delaying cases that are currently baked into the system. In undergrad, he told people he wanted to “use math to help people,” and he’s grateful to have found a way to do it as an operations professor.
For what else is he grateful?
“My fantastic students,” he says. “I don’t know everyone who nominated me, but thank you to the ones that told me: Adam, Akshay, Andrew, Andy, Ani, Aryana, Ashley, Athena, Briana, Candace, Case, Chase, Diana, Gabe, Hollis, Irina, Izabayo, Jasmijn, Javier, Jett, Josh, Keller, Koichiro, Lauren, Lucero, Manny, Masha, Mateo, Max, Maximo, Mckenzie, Mustafa, Nicholas, Nicole, Noa, Paige, Peter, Raisa, Razi, Ryan, Sari, Sean, Shaleen, ShooShoo, Sophia, Thomas, Tony, Ty, Will, Yasmin, and Ziran.
“Y’all make me want to keep teaching for a long, long time.”
Michael Sherrod is the William M. Dickey Entrepreneur in Residence and Senior Instructor at TCU’s Neeley Business School.
At the other end of the experience spectrum is Michael Sherrod, 72, the William M. Dickey Entrepreneur in Residence and Senior Instructor at TCU’s Neeley Business School. He is also the first publisher and founding board member of the Texas Tribune, a pioneering online news organization and one of the first major publications to take on the nonprofit model.
What makes him stand out as a business professor? “Starting 19 companies, six of them inside large corporations, has given me broad and deep experience as an entrepreneur and a unique perspective as a senior corporate executive. I’ve had big exits and significant failures and everything in between. I’ve managed large entities inside major corporations,” he says.
“Having had a foot in both worlds, I’m able to speak knowledgably and transfer my experiences into immediate actionable learning that will allow my students to create value no matter where they work or what they do.”
A WIDE RANGE OF RESEARCH TOPICS
This year’s honorees teach the fundamentals of business – finance, accounting, marketing and strategy – as well topics on the cutting edge of business education. Their research interests are as varied as their backgrounds.
Sandra Corredor, for example, is working with two other faculty at Gies’ Disruption Lab to evaluate the effectiveness of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and in-person exercises in training professional skills such as negotiations.
“Our goal is to advance business education by leveraging these technologies to expand access to high-quality, skills-development exercises. We are discovering that these tools can be highly effective in teaching complex skills traditionally taught through intensive coaching,” says Corredor, a disruption and innovation scholar as well as Associate Head of the Department of Business Administration at University of Illinois’ Gies College of Business.
Pedro Monteiro
And Pedro Monteiro is studying how lay ideas about organizational theory influence investigations into technical failures, such as Boeing’s 737 MAX accidents.
“This research emerged from assigning reports on organizational failures to my students, which made me realize how widespread yet underexamined these lay ideas are,” says Monteiro, Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School and a Malmsten Early Career Scholar at Gothenburg University.
“So far, the discoveries seem to be that investigations are often less analytically coherent than expected, acknowledging organizational causes but missing how interconnected elements contribute to incidents.”
LEADING THE WAY IN CREATING GOOD CITIZENS
While all the professors on this year’s list excel at teaching their subjects in the classrooms, many go beyond that. They are using their influence and expertise to mold students into impactful citizens of Planet Earth.
Take Jason Brennan, the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. In 2022, he won the Provost’s Innovation in Teaching Award for his development of the Ethics Project, an experiential project with a very simple mandate: “Think of something good to do…and do it.”
“We were given a $1000 budget and told to ‘do something good.’ The open-ended nature of the project really pushed us to innovate and problem-solve from beginning to end. As a first-semester freshman, it was the perfect introduction to group work, business, and morality,” student Zella O’Malley says.
Amelia Hart believes that education is one of the great equalizers. Beyond her duties as Associate Professor of Practice in Accounting and Information Management at University of Tennessee Knoxville’s Haslam College of Business, Hart serves on numerous non-profit boards as well as faculty communities and industry associations. She is the inaugural recipient of the 2024 Inclusive Leadership Award at Haslam.
Amelia Hart
“The next wave of business leaders cannot be transactional, they must be transformative. Business schools should invest in human intelligence with similar diligence as it is in generative AI so that future leaders are better prepared for responding and managing change, problem solving, ethical dilemmas, and empathy,” she tells P&Q.
At University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business, Amit Kumar combines his backgrounds in psychology and marketing to study human happiness and why we think, feel, and behave in the way we do. He teaches the Science of Good Business to undergraduate students,
“I think the business school of the future really needs to focus more on doing good in addition to doing well (note: these goals are not necessarily in conflict with each other),” Kumar says.
“I’m sincerely filled with gratitude when students tell me how much they’ve gotten out of my course when they take it, but they also often mention that it’s unlike anything else they’ve experienced in business school. If students find learning about these topics so valuable, why aren’t there more offerings available for them to learn even more? It’s worth it for business schools to think about mission maximization so that students aren’t exclusively exposed to profit maximization as an outcome.”
NEXT PAGE: P&Q’s 50 Best Undergraduate Professors of 2024
