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Faculty Awards Recognize Excellence at CBA

The Faculty Awards Reception for the College of Business Administration was held, Wednesday, April 25 at the Van Brunt Visitors Center. Dr. Donde Plowman, the James, Jr. and Susan Stuart Endowed Dean of CBA, presented the awards to the ten award recipients.

The award winners with comments included from the presentation:

Distinguished Teaching Award (Tenure Track/Tenured Faculty)
  • Subrata Chakrabarty

    Subrata Chakrabarty and Dean Plowman

    Subrata Chakrabarty, Assistant Professor of Management

    Chakrabarty joined UNL in 2010 as an assistant professor and teaches the business policies senior capstone course and a Ph.D. course in strategic management. One of his students wrote, “Dr. Chakrabarty taught from material written by leading intellectuals.” In doing so, he creates a unique class structure that encourages students to develop their own ideas and thoughts on read world issues, with input from the articles of highly reputed sources.

     

Excellence in Teaching Award (Non Tenure Track)
  • Weixing Li

    Weixing Li and Dean Plowman

    Weixing Li, Assistant Professor of Practice of Management

    Li started teaching at UNL in 2003. His teaching interests are international management, organizational behavior and human resource management. He also leads a China Study Abroad program which will depart in about a week. He also assists students with getting internships, which accordinging to student Chris Reznicek, “opened new doors for me and impacted my career aspirations.”

     

MBA Distance Teaching Award
  • Emre Unlu

    Emre Unlu and Dean Plowman

    Emre Unlu, Assistant Professor, Finance Department

    Unlu is a two-time recipient in this category and last year also won the Best Paper award. His expertise is in corporate finance and he started at the College of Business in August 2007. His students report that he gets them to not only learn the information, but also critically think through why financial principles work and how they are interconnected. This is challenging to do in any online course, but the students said he asked the key questions that get them interested in the subject.

     

Graduate Student Teaching Award
  • Jiri Tresl

    Jiri Tresl

    Jiri Tresl, Assistant Professor, Ph.D. student, Department of Finance

    Tresl has taught the introductory corporate finance (FINA 361) course and the senior-level capstone finance (FINA 4610 course), which is the most difficult course for finance majors. According to Gordie Karels, Jiri stood out from the time he entered the department. He said, “He is the most accomplished graduate instructor I have witnessed in my 25 years of UNL.” Jiri received the highest teaching evaluation Gordie had ever seen in a large lecture recitation section of 200 - a 4.9 out of 5.

     

Graduate Student Research Award
  • Justine Rapp

    Justine Rapp and Donde Plowman

    Justine Rapp, Ph.D. student, Department of Marketing

    Rapp is a third year marketing Ph.D. student who has published three articles (two in the Journal of Advertising and one in the Journal of Business Ethics) in her first two years at UNL -- this was a first for our doctoral program. Her research in social marketing is meaningful, as she is looking at a possible path to compulsive consumption, one starting with impulsive consumption. Her preliminary research has shown a link between the two types of purchasing and should provide insight for possible public policy actions as well as managerial best practices. She presented her research in social marketing at the Mittelstaedt Doctoral Symposium, an honor generally held for the doctoral student furthest along in the dissertation, though she was at the coursework state.

     

Faculty Service Award
  • Richard DeFusco

    Richard DeFusco and Donde Plowman

    Richard DeFusco, Professor of Finance

    DeFusco has been instrumental in building the reputation of the Department of Finance and CBA in the investments and portfolios management area. A major portion of that reputation came from the recognition of UNL as Program Partner School by the CFA Institute. There are 140 university partners worldwide and only 58 in the U.S. Richard earned his CFA charter in 1999 and has been actively involved. He co-authored a textbook that is used to assist candidates in the preparation for the three levels of program exams, grades exams and has joined a select group of charter-holders who writes the exams. He is one of five voting members of the Nebraska Investment Council (NIC), an agency of the state. He has been an active member of the MBA Committee for around 10 years and helped develop the Distance MBA program.

     

Distinguished Service Award
  • Michelle Jacobs

    Michelle Jacobs and Donde Plowman

    Michelle Jacobs, Administrative Coordinator, Department of Marketing

    Jacobs is a constant within the Department of Marketing and acts in a proactive manner to keep her department moving forward. She monitors the status of the faculty, Ph.D. students and undergraduate students, and all give her glowing recommendations. One of best examples of her innovative contributions is the early adoption of the Digital Measures system. She is considered a campus leader on the system and has given presentations to the department administrators, faculty and deans across the university on the benefits of the system. She inspires teamwork and puts the needs of the department in front of her own.

     

Best Paper Award
  • Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

    Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

    Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Professor of Management

    Nah’s paper, “Enhancing Brand Equity Through Flow and Telepresence: A Comparison of 2D and 3D Virtual Worlds” was published MIS Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3, September 2011. It answers a pressing business question on the potential of 3-dimensional virtual worlds for branding and marketing. It is original and innovative in that it is the first research publication to examine the business implications of 3D versus 2D virtual worlds. The paper has a high level of overall quality including scientific rigor and practical relevance, and is expected to make a strong impact on the academic literature by being the first to provide a theoretically-driving empirical answer to an important research question.

     

Distinguished Research Award (co-winners)
  • Geoffrey Friesen

    Geoffrey Friesen and Donde Plowman

    Geoffrey Friesen, Associate Professor of Finance

    Friesen joined the Department of Finance as Assistant Professor in July 2005. Last year, he was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor. In the last three years, he has published two articles in the Journal of Banking and Finance, has an article in press at the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis and recently had a paper accepted at the Journal of Wealth Management. In addition to publishing papers, he has five working papers he continues to polish for submission. He has two additional research projects that he is preparing for submission. He promotes research actively within the department and worked with a number of doctoral students – all of his recently published papers are co-authored with our Ph.D. students.

     

  • Seth Giertz

    Seth Giertz and Donde Plowman

    Seth Giertz, Assistant Professor of Economics

    Giertz joined CBA in 2008. Over the past three years, he has written or published 10 articles. He was published in the Journal of Economic Literature in which he critically examines the elasticity of taxable income and the Journal of Housing Economics in which examines the stress test scenarios that were used to assess the fiscal health of the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in the years leading up to their collapse. He was also published in the Journal of Labor Research and this work was particularly important given the rapid increase in federal disability rolls in recent years. He also wrote “Options for Changing the Tax Treatment of Charitable Giving for the CBO Report in May 2011 of the Congressional Budget Office in D.C.

     
Published: May 1, 2012