The Smith School has been awarded a four-year, $1.4 million grant by
the U.S. Department of Education to fund a Center for International
Business Education and Research (CIBER). This high honor designates
the Smith School as a national resource center in international
business education and research. There are only 31 CIBERs in the
nation.
The federal government instituted the CIBER program to increase
U.S. competitiveness in the global marketplace by creating useful
links between the business and academic communities on international
business issues. In addition to programmatic enhancements and
faculty research, the Smith School CIBER will support conferences
and seminars, training, and consulting to the business community in
the mid-Atlantic region as part of its outreach activities.
A key area of concern to international businesses relates to
national and homeland security and its implications for enterprise
continuity; the Smith School CIBER will provide significant
leadership in this area. The Smith School’s Larry Gordon, Ernst &
Young Alumni Professor of Managerial Accounting, and Martin Loeb,
professor of accounting and information assurance and Deloitte &
Touche LLP Faculty Fellow, are already well known for their research
relating to the economics of information security. The Smith School
CIBER will combine their work with existing programs and centers in
the University of Maryland which deal with national and homeland
security. The Smith School CIBER will sponsor its first Conference
on Global Security in 2008 to bring together the best scholars in
this nascent domain along with leaders from government and business.
 The
Smith School CIBER will pursue other strategic initiatives as well.
The University of Maryland has extensive resources related to
language study and research, and the center will leverage those
resources to develop business language courses and support the
school’s International Fellows track of the Undergraduate Fellows
Program. Global e-commerce, entrepreneurship and innovation, global
services and emerging markets are also among the CIBER’s strategic
initiatives.
Vinod Jain, PhD ’94, senior director of professional programs and
director of the Smith School CIBER, thinks the center will have a
significant impact on students and faculty as well as the wider
business community. “The center’s outreach activities will give
students many more opportunities to interact with global business
people, which can only help them as they begin their careers in
today’s global economy,” says Jain.
Students will find that more of their courses contain an
international component, compliments of curriculum development
grants from the Smith School CIBER. Faculty members will have the
opportunity to pursue internationally focused research in their own
disciplines and present their research at global conferences, funded
partly by CIBER. |
