Research and Teaching Awards

Congratulations Lisa Koonce, Yong Yu, Jeri Seidman and Erin Towery, winners of 4 (FOUR!) McCombs research and teaching awards.
Our highly-ranked accounting program depends on the research and teaching excellence of our colleagues –so thank you for making us shine! When we get news like this, I always like to know more about why the person won the award – so here is more information about their accomplishments:

• Professor Lisa Koonce, the Deloitte and Touche Chair in Accounting, is receiving the 2011-12 Award for Research Excellence

  Lisa has made a substantial contribution to two topical fields within accounting—auditing and financial reporting. Collectively, her research has garnered nearly 600 citations from the Web of Science and nearly 1,500 from Google Scholar. The latter research stream has solidified Lisa’s prominence as a thought-leader for accounting standards. She is one of six advisors to the Financial Accounting Standards Board Research Initiative. Lisa’s financial reporting research has been highly relevant to both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Accounting Standards Board.
  We are very proud that Lisa Koonce is being recognized by her peers in the McCombs School for the impact of her excellent research! She is among our very best teachers, too – in the rigorous Intermediate Accounting courses for MPAs and MBAs.
  
  

• Yong Yu is awarded the 2011-12 CBA Foundation Research Excellence Award for Assistant Professors

  The broad goal of Yong’s research is to understand the economic forces that influence the production, transmission and use of accounting information in capital markets. His primary research areas examine the acquisition and processing of accounting information by financial analysts and institutional investors, and the economic determinants and consequences of managers' disclosure decisions. 
  Yong is generous with his intellectual capital – working with colleagues here, nationally and globally – and is an especially good mentor to our doctoral students. He brings his research insights to his excellent Financial Statement Analysis course, too. Yong is being promoted to Associate Professor effective September 1, 2012. Thank you for your contributions, Yong!
  

• Assistant Professor Jeri Seidman will receive the 2011-12 Trammell/CBA Foundation Teaching Award for Assistant Professors
  

  Jeri joined our faculty in Fall of 2008 after completing her Ph.D. program at MIT. Her teaching and research is enriched by her practice experience at Deloitte. Since joining the faculty at Texas in Fall of 2008, Jeri has taught ACC 355 and 380K.11 – Introduction to Taxation, which is a critical course to our MPA program taken by our integrated students in their junior year. Students in our traditional Masters program also take this course if they have not had it in their undergraduate program. 
  Jeri obtains consistently high CIS ratings (4.5/5.0) while also demonstrating high standards. Jeri’s GPAs for the course runs about 3.3. Our representative to the teaching awards committee said that the rigor plus high ratings was an important combination in making its decision. 
  

• 4th year Doctoral student Erin Towery received the 2011-12 Fred Moore Assistant Instructor Awards for Teaching Excellence
  

  Erin has proven herself to be an outstanding instructor, who brought valuable insights and understanding to students in ACC 311 (Fundamentals of Financial Accounting), one of the Department’s two introductory accounting courses required of undergraduates business students. Her CIS scores are extremely high for this difficult entry course, with an Overall Instructor Rating of 4.8 in Summer 2011. We heard that the awards committee was amazed to observe a 4.8 CIS score by students whose average GPA was well below 3.0 in the summer ACC311 course. Her teaching and research is enriched by her practice experience at PWC.
  

 

Faculty Endowments

The Department of Accounting is happy to learn from Dean Tom Gilligan that UT’s Executive Vice President and Provost Steve Leslie just approved the following endowments, effective September 1, 2012:

• Professor Ross Jennings will be appointed as the Deloitte Professor of Accounting:

  The quality and variety of his new ideas for research come from his efforts to teach MPA and PhD students the most demanding current issues. His research on fundamental accounting questions helps Ross teach future CPAs and business leaders to critically evaluate accounting information. Ross is an active scholar of note and the doctoral mentor who anchors our capital markets program. Ross has made extraordinary contributions as an educator over 25 years, winning 11 separate teaching awards and teaching 9 different financial accounting courses across 10 programs. He developed our accounting theory course as a newly-promoted associate professor. He developed the freshman signature class and simultaneously took over the capital markets seminar (while also teaching Exec MBAs) when he was re-establishing his post-chair research agenda. He is also proud to have encouraged the creation of our award-winning Tax Practicum course whereby students prepare income tax returns for low-income Austin residents. 

• Associate Professor Volker Laux will hold a Deloitte & Touche Centennial Faculty Fellowship in Accounting.
  

  Volker Laux conducts analytical research in the corporate governance area. Most of his papers explore this theme by studying the effects of various corporate governance mechanisms (such as board structure and legal environment) on board behavior (such as board oversight, CEO compensation design, and CEO replacement decisions) and CEO behavior (such as earnings manipulation, disclosure, and project selection). One of our most prolific researchers, Laux has two newly-accepted papers this spring. Volker is also a favorite of our doctoral students for his crystalline explanations of economic theory. He also hosted our successful spring conference this March, drawing analytical researchers and doctoral students from around the country to exchange ideas.

• Associate Professor Michael Williamson will hold the Ernst & Young Faculty Fellowship in Accounting.

  An award-winning teacher across multiple programs, Michael’s heart is in the honors program, where he teaches sophomore managerial accounting and helps attract the top students into the accounting major. Williamson’s research examines the influence of performance-evaluation and reward system design on employee behavior. Utilizing laboratory experiments, his specific research program integrates theories from economics and psychology to provide new and important insights to this area. His research can be described in the context of two interrelated literature streams. The first stream examines how formal performance evaluation and reward systems affect employee productivity, creativity and risk-taking. The second stream investigates how management accounting practices affect the efficiency of informal reward systems by fostering or hindering trust and reciprocity. Williamson's research on creativity and incentives has won multiple awards.
  
  These appointments recognize the significant contributions of these colleagues to accounting scholarship.
  

Faculty Honor Roll

Congratulations to lecturers Stephen Smith and Gretch B Charrier for earning their placement on the Fall 2011 Faculty Honor Roll for the BBA program. Their hard work and dedication to students has not gone unnoticed.

 

 

Welcome to Austin!

Brian White has accepted our Faculty offer!

Brian holds a Bachelor’s degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, a Master’s degree in African Studies from the University of Edinburgh and an MBA from Manchester Business School. Brian’s primary research interest lies in investigating behavioral questions related to financial and managerial accounting, with a specific focus on the role of heuristic judgment and emotion. Outside of work, he enjoys running, skiing and entertaining friends and family with his wife and three young children.

 

 

New Hire

Judson Caskey will be joining us later this year as an Assistant Professor.

Currently hailing from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, Caskey conducts both analytical and empirical research on how capital markets generate and use accounting information. At UCLA, he taught the first year MBA financial accounting course. Prior to graduate school, Caskey worked as an auditor at Ernst & Young and as a financial systems and reporting consultant. He is a registered status (non-practicing) CPA. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his wife, Wendy, and two children, Andrew and Sarah.

 

Faculty Promotions

Two members of our department have been recommended by the President for promotion effective September 1, 2012:

Yong Yu to Associate Professor
Yong Yu received his Ph.D. in accounting from Pennsylvania State University in 2006. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Accounting. His current research interests include sell-side analysts, investor behavior, and management disclosure. His current teaching interests focus primarily on financial statement analysis.

 

 

Brian Lendecky to Senior Lecturer
Brian Lendecky is a lecturer in the Department of Accounting at The University of Texas at Austin. He joined the department in 2006 and teaches Financial Accounting, Cost and Managerial Accounting, and the Tax Practicum course, the latter winning a 2008 Governor’s Volunteer Award and a 2011 Tower Award. Brian also teaches Managerial and Cost Accounting courses in the McCombs Executive Education program, the Mexico City and Dallas / Ft. Worth MBA programs, the ESCP-EAP European School of Management in Paris, the VSE School of Economics in Prague, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Brian Lendecky started his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers and has subsequently managed accounting departments in the food manufacturing, energy, and medical supplies manufacturing industries.

Brian has received numerous teaching awards including the 2010 CBA Foundation Advisory Council Award for Teaching Innovation and the MPA Council’s 2011 Outstanding Accounting Faculty Award. He has also been named to the McCombs Faculty Honor Roll in 2007, 2008, and 2009 and was nominated by the Faculty Affairs Committee of the Senate of College Councils and the Undergraduate Business Council for the Professor of the Year Award for 2009. Brian is also the McCombs Faculty Advisor for the PriceWaterhouseCoopers xACT and xTAX case competitions and our McCombs team has been a national finalist in 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2011.

Brian is a licensed CPA in the State of Texas and is a proud alumnus of the McCombs School’s MPA program. Brian and his wife Stephanie stay busy chasing around the four boys in their house. In his spare time Brian is an avid sports fan and poker player. He has played in the World Series of Poker twice and has made a World Poker Tour final table.