Smith's Doctoral Candidates Take Posts at Business Schools Worldwide

The Robert H. Smith School of Business doctoral program may not make headlines each month, but it does each May, marking the end of another rigorous academic cycle. By the end of August, the school will graduate nine students for the 2003-2004 academic year. To give a sense of the global nature of the positions being accepted by these graduates, below is some information, including their dissertation titles, on four of the doctoral candidates:

Meghana Ayyagari
Assistant Professor of Finance
George Washington University
Washington, D.C., USA
"International Corporate Governance:
A Study of Complementarities and Convergence"

Vincent Duriau
Assistant Professor of Strategy
Instituto Technologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM)
Mexico City, DF, Mexico
"The Performance of Global Business Teams Within Multinational Corporations: The Test of an Intervening Process Model"

Riki Takeuchi
Assistant Professor of Management
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Kowloon, Hong Kong, China
"How Do We Get There from Here? Understanding the Black Box in Strategic HRM Research from Resource-based and Social Exchange Perspectives"

Lei Zhou
Assistant Professor of Accounting
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
"The Value of Information Security Audits, Asymmetric Information, and Information Security Investments"

Riki Takeuchi, already teaching at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, recollects his doctoral program days at the Smith School of Business: "The Smith PhD program was extremely rewarding, but I benefited the most from the supportive and collegial culture of the Smith faculty and PhD students. In fact, the faculty's unusual willingness to work on projects outside their main research areas proved invaluable to me, furthering my research studies and dissertation defense."

Takeuchi says, "Now that I'm an assistant professor of management at HKUST, I can leverage the research training-and the collaborative spirit-I received at Smith. Working on projects with Smith faculty members, together with PhD students, is the best way to get the most from the Smith doctoral program experience."

Dean Howard Frank recently addressed a gathering of the Smith doctoral program's graduates and students: "Without a great PhD program, you can not be a great business school. And if you don't have a great PhD program, you can't get great faculty." He continued, "It's the faculty that go out from your schools who get jobs at [other] significant business schools and become the assistant, associate, and full professors. They, in turn, build their own cadre of PhD schools." Frank finished by saying, "The two things you want are to become great researchers and superb teachers," because these, as higher-education evaluators know, define a first-class business school.

One such academic assessor is the Financial Times, which ranked the world-class Smith School #6 in faculty research worldwide in 2001 and 2002, and #7 in 2003. "With top rankings like these, the Smith PhD program is poised to become one of the top 10 doctoral programs in the nation in the next three-to-five years," declares Dr. Lawrence Gordon, Ernst & Young Alumni Professor of Managerial Accounting and Information Assurance and Director of the Smith School's PhD program.

The next academic cycle promises to be equally challenging for 23 new doctoral students accepted into the Smith PhD program. They are:

Decision & Information Technologies

Catherine Anderson
Srinivas Kudaravalli
William Mennell
Ritu Narayan
Scott Nestler
Kiran Panchamgam
Matthew Reindorp
Yong Kwang Yeow

Finance

Aysun Alp
Matthew Kozora
Minwen Li
Yue Xiao

Logistics, Business & Public Policy

Tong Bao
John MacDonald

Management & Organization

Alan Boss
Azi Gera
Lori Kiyatkin
Catherine LaCross
Hong Li
David Major

Marketing

Francine Espinoza
Carol Miu
Hui-Hsing Tseng

For more information on the PhD program and its students, visit the program's Web site or contact Mary Slye, PhD Program Office at 301.405.2214.