The University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business welcomed eight new faculty members for the start of the fall 2019 semester. The new faculty joined three Smith academic departments to teach courses and focus on research. The Decision, Operations and Information Technologies Department added four faculty members: John Bono, associate clinical professor, has a PhD in information systems from Nova Southeastern University. Jui Ramaprasad, associate professor, has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine.

The University of Groningen in the Netherlands has awarded Maryland Smith marketing professor Michel Wedel the 2019 Ubbo Emmius Medal for science merits. Wedel, a native of the Netherlands, is recognized for his prolific research, particularly his work on eye tracking and visual marketing. He received the award at a ceremony at the University of Groningen on Monday, Sept. 2.

Michel Wedel, the PepsiCo Professor of Consumer Science at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, has won the 2019 Buck Weaver Award from the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science. The prize recognizes career achievement in marketing science. Earlier in 2019, Wedel received the Irwin/McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award, which also recognizes sustained contributions to marketing.

Peng Huang, associate professor in the Decisions, Operations and Information Technologies Department at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, received the Best Conference Paper Award at the 2018 International Conference on Information Systems for his research paper, “Does One Size Fit All? Theorizing Governance Configurations for Digital Innovation.” His was selected out of more than 1,200 submissions.

Santiago Luna, the coordinator for the Center for Global Business at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, writes about the Faculty Development in International Business program.

New funding will allow the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business to extend and expand post-harvest loss research with a consortium of global partners in Africa. The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research will contribute $2.8 million to build on work started in 2016. Other organizations will match the investment, giving the consortium a $5.7 million budget through 2021.

Professor Lemma Senbet at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business has been appointed to the Distinguished Advisory Board of the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. “You join a panel of select, high-level policymakers, academics and practitioners on African socio-economic development issues,” Africa Growth Initiative director Brahima S. Coulibaly writes in a March 7, 2019, letter to Senbet.

A University of Maryland research team, including representatives of Maryland Smith’s Supply Chain Management Center, will present findings supporting their recently completed "Climate Change Variability/Vulnerability Index” in a free webinar, hosted by software firm and project partner Resilinc, at 2 p.m. Wednesday, May 8. 

Full-time MBA student Ha Le, class of 2020, writes about the 2019 PhD International Research Award Recipient, Sabari Karmegam.

Smart machines do many things better than humans, but Deloitte executive Bill Eggers has good news for workers worried about a robot apocalypse. “This very dystopian narrative that we see, there’s no evidence for it historically,” he said March 29, 2019, at the third annual Smith Analytics Consortium thought leadership conference at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. “In every other period of technological revolution, we’ve created more jobs than we’ve lost.”