Students at the Yale School of Management can look forward to five fresh faces among the faculty this year.
Four new ladder-track junior professors are already on campus for the fall: Daylian Cain in organizational behavior, Merle Ederhof in accounting, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak in economics and Oliver Rutz in marketing. Former University of Pennsylvania professor Andrew Metrick ’89 will join the faculty as a tenured professor of finance in the spring semester.
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Of the new faculty hires, Metrick has received the most attention because of his distinguished reputation as a financial economist, administrators said. His work has focused on venture capital, private equity, corporate governance and decision-making.
Podolny said in an announcement that Metrick has made significant scholarly and creative contributions to numerous areas of finance. His teaching skills complement his personal academic achievements, Podolny said.
“In his years at Wharton and Harvard, students have consistently recognized him for his teaching excellence, and our students will be equally enthusiastic to learn from him,” he said.
While the new hires will enrich their respective departments, according to Deputy Dean Stanley Garstka, this is not an unusually large number of new hires for one year.
“The yield on offers extended to faculty to join the school is subject to a lot of variance — some years not many accept our offers and other years many do,” Garstka said. “It is a very competitive market and this is expected.”
Garstka said each new faculty member will benefit the SOM community in a different and specific way.
“One of the new hires, Cain, an assistant professor of organization behavior, will help us to build the organizational behavior group to a critical mass and he will teach a new elective class on leadership and values, which will fill a gap in the current curriculum,” Garstka said.
Ravi Dhar, a professor of marketing and director of the Center for Customer Insights, said he is greatly anticipating the addition of Rutz to his marketing department because he has the ability to build bridges to faculty in other arenas.
“Oliver brings high-powered statistical tools to bear on important problems in marketing that require analyzing a large database, such as those generated naturally on the Internet,” Dhar said. “It is a nice complementary skill set to other marketing faculty who look at similar questions using more econometric techniques.”
The new professors’ arrival follows last year’s overhaul of the SOM curriculum, which now focuses on emulating real-world situations and leadership training.