Remembering Smith Faculty Member Joe Perfetti

The Robert H. Smith School of Business is mourning the loss of faculty member Joe Perfetti. Perfetti was a valued lecturer who taught core finance courses in both the undergraduate and MBA programs for the last 17 years. He received multiple awards for teaching excellence between 2013 and 2020, including two consecutive Faculty Member of Distinction awards, as voted by the students themselves. 

Perfetti taught hundreds of students each year at the Smith School, totaling over 6,000 undergraduate students during his almost two decades as faculty member, colleague and Smith Clinical Professor Michael Cichello remembered. “Joe devoted his life to education both in the traditional classroom and in the corporate classroom,” Cichello said. 

Cichello said that Perfetti was also able to connect with finance and non-finance executives, using fantastic analysis and takeaways in his teaching. “I learned a lot from Joe in this respect,” he added. 

“He was very well regarded. The students often quoted him outside of class,” Colleague and Senior Lecturer Sarah Kroncke said. “He loved students, he loved teaching and he loved being at Maryland.”

Perfetti’s area of expertise was in corporate finance and strategy and he delivered over 2,000 executive teaching days over the past 25 years. Outside of the classroom, he worked as a consultant and delivered 80 days of executive education annually for leading corporations and consulting firms including Deloitte, Google (Alphabet), Heidrick Consulting, UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health and many more. 

A serial entrepreneur, he started Intelliworks Inc., a venture-backed CRM company focused on higher education and an online knowledge sharing company. Intelliworks was acquired in 2011 by Hobsons.

Dean Prabhudev Konana expressed deepest sympathies to Perfetti’s family, friends, colleagues and students. “His presence in our community will be profoundly missed,” Konana said in a statement to the Smith community.