April 20, 2004
Five Faculty Members Awarded New Appointments
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Congratulations are due to several McCombs professors. Last week, George Gau, dean of the McCombs School, announced five new endowment appointments for meritorious faculty members: Prabhudev Konana, Julie Irwin, Doug Morrice, Vish Krishnan and Alison Davis-Blake.
Sheldon Ekland-Olson, Provost of The University of Texas at Austin, has approved the appointment of Alison Davis-Blake to the Eddy Clark Scurlock Centennial Professorship in Management. Davis-Blake, an expert in strategic human resources, has been at the McCombs School for almost fifteen years. She is a professor, a former chair of the Department of Management, and currently serves as the senior associate dean for academic affairs. Her new appointment will be effective on Sept. 1, 2004.
In addition, several new fellowship appointments have been awarded to meritorious faculty for the upcoming year.
Konana, Irwin and Morrice have been awarded the College of Business Administration Foundation Advisory Council Centennial Fellowships.
Of these three, Morrice, a professor in the Department of Management, has been at McCombs the longest, having arrived in 1990 directly upon earning his Ph.D. from Cornell. He chose to come to The University of Texas at Austin, he says, because the school’s goals closely dovetailed with his own of jointly pursuing the teaching and research of management science. Specifically, he was interested in using computer simulations to model manufacturing service systems. Since then, Morrice says, he has been consistently pleased with the fact that he is able to explore his own interests here, among other things. “Over the years, this has been a fantastic place to work,” he reflects. “I’ve worked for and with some very good people.”
Currently, Morrice serves as the director of the McCombs School’s Supply Chain Consortium. The school’s willingness to institute such a program speaks to one of his favorite aspects of working at McCombs. “This school has a reputation for being kind of entrepreneurial,” he says. “They’re not afraid to step out and try something new.”
Prabhudev Konana, a professor in the Department of Management Science and Information Systems who currently serves as director of the department's undergraduate MIS program (among teaching and research duties with graduate students), has been at The University of Texas at Austin since 1995. He is a specialist in information technology and electronic exchanges. A stack of teaching awards testifies to his ability to make potentially remote subjects accessible to students. He has been elected to the elective class honor roll, won the Trammell/CBA Foundation Teaching Award in 2000, the El Paso Energy Foundation Teaching Excellence Award in 2002, and in 2003, he was elected to the university's Academy of Distinguished Teachers—an honor limited to 5% of the university’s faculty.
Julie Irwin, the third professor to receive a CBA Foundation Advisory Council Centennial Fellowship, has been teaching marketing at McCombs since 1999. She was trained as a cognitive psychologist and leverages that expertise in her research on consumer judgment and decision-making, especially as they are affected by emotion, ethics and risk.
A fourth fellowship, the College of Business Administration Foundation Fellowship in Business, was awarded to Vish Krishnan. Krishnan, a professor of management, has been at McCombs for eleven years, since 1993. In that time, he has come to appreciate a number of aspects of life at McCombs. “My faculty colleagues and students are wonderful—socially and intellectually,” he says. “Add to that our friendly staff! The network of firms we have in Austin and Texas is also a big plus. And as a large state school, we have some unique challenges and responsibilities.” He is currently pursuing a number of interconnected research projects, including work on how to use technology to improve information work productivity and how to innovate collaboratively with multiple partner firms.
All of these fellowships, which will be in effect in the coming academic year, have been awarded to recognize their recipients' service to the McCombs School and academic achievements. Such dedication represents a great commitment on the part of these professors, especially since they have numerous other demands on their interests. Morrice, for example, concerned that his formal education emphasized engineering and math to the exclusion of all other disciplines, is trying to round it out by studying history, philosophy and theology. Krishnan has his hands full beating his six-year-old son in chess. “He is not easy to beat, as he ranks near the top in city and state championships!” he notes.
For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.
