Attracting and Retaining World-Class Faculty

Goal: $15 Million

The Smith faculty is the school’s greatest strength. Smith has added more than 80 new faculty members over the past seven years, many of them coming from the world’s premier research institutions. These men and women were recruited for excellence in research and teaching and their ability to advance the school’s netcentric agenda, which explores the ongoing transformation of business through world-wide digital information networks.

In order to move from research excellence to greatness, however, the Smith School of Business must continue to recruit internationally recognized senior faculty and rising stars by dedicating increased resources to endowed chairs and professorships. The school must also encourage existing department capabilities by increasing funding for faculty research and strengthening support systems for junior faculty.

Spotlight

Roland Rust 

Roland Rust
Distinguished University Professor
David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing
Co-Director, Center for Excellence in Service

The Smith School marketing department received a boost in 2000 with the appointment of Roland Rust as the David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing. A renowned expert in the area of customer-focused marketing, Rust created a center devoted to its study, the Center for Excellence in Service. His prodigious scholarship has garnered many awards including the American Marketing Association’s Gilbert A. Churchill Award for Lifetime Achievement in Marketing Research and the Distinguished Marketing Scholar Award from the Society for Marketing Advances. Rust’s customer equity model has been  adopted by three of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies as part of their marketing strategies. In 2008, Rust was named distinguished university professor. The title is granted as a formal title of the highest distinction by the university president. It recognizes University of Maryland faculty who have earned exceptional merit nationally and internationally for the importance of their scholarly and creative achievements, contributions and service.

Pete Kyle 

Albert “Pete” Kyle
Charles E. Smith Chair in Finance

Albert “Pete” Kyle, one of the foremost financial theorists in the world, joined the Smith faculty in 2006 as the Charles E. Smith Chair in Finance. He is best known for creating the “Kyle Model,” which provides a foundation for the modern theory of market microstructure, a subfield of finance dealing with the process of price formation in financial markets. Kyle’s previous acquaintance with the school was a factor in his decision to join the faculty. He says, “I knew almost all the members of the finance faculty from meeting them at conferences and seminars and reading their work. Smith professors are quite visible internationally.” The professor plans to take special advantage of the school’s proximity to Washington, D.C., to explore public policy issues relevant to his long-term research interests, including the regulation of bank and non-bank financial intermediaries. Kyle joined Smith after serving as professor of finance at the Fuqua School of Business.

Ritu Agarwal 

Ritu Agarwal
Professor & Robert H. Smith Dean's Chair of Information Systems
Founder & Director of the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems

Dr. Agarwal has published over 75 papers on information technology management topics in journals. She also has has worked extensively with Fortune 500 companies including 3M, Freddie Mac, Dow Chemicals, Rohm and Haas, AstraZeneca, NCR, and others on a variety of research and consulting engagements and made several presentations to groups of senior IT and business executives. Recently she gave testimony to the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS) where she discussed her research (with doctoral student Corey Angst and CapMed) on early adopters of electronic personal health records, their usage patterns, concerns about privacy, and the value patients derive from this technology.