Faculty Welcomes Seven New Colleagues

New faculty members: (from left to right) C. Lanier Benkard, Yossi Feinberg, Romain Wacziarg, Larissa Tiedens, Ming Huang, and Timothy Groseclose. Photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover

THE SCHOOL welcomed six new tenure-track junior faculty in the fall of 1998. In addition, Hau Lee, who is the Kleiner, Perkins, Mayfield, Sequoia Capital Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering, has become a professor of operations, information, and technology at the Business School. In the past he held a courtesy appointment at the GSB. Lee is also director of the Supply Chain Forum, a group that brings faculty and students from various Stanford schools and disciplines together with industry partners. His areas of specialization include supply chain management, global logistics system design, inventory planning, quality control and assurance, and manufacturing strategy.

Hau Lee

Among the junior faculty, Larissa Tiedens joins the School as an assistant professor of organizational behavior, and C. Lanier Benkard, Yossi Feinberg, and Romain Wacziarg are assistant professors of economics. Wacziarg taught previously at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Timothy Groseclose, an associate professor of political economy, previously held faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon and Ohio State universities. Ming Huang, assistant professor of finance, taught at the University of Chicago Business School, where he received the 1997 Emory Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching. Groseclose and Huang are GSB alumni, having earned their PhDs at the Business School in 1992 and 1996, respectively.

THE INSTITUTE for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (Informs) presented its 1998 Expository Writing Award to J. Michael Harrison, the Gregor G. Peterson Professor of Operations Management, for his book Brownian Motion and Stochastic Flow Systems (John Wiley and Sons, 1985) and his many papers on stochastic models in various business domains. Harrison's work "makes complex mathematical ideas and developments accessible to the Informs community," says the citation accompanying the award. "These publications are outstanding examples of clear and concise writing on topics and issues of importance to the profession."

The Expository Writing Award, one of 11 major prizes sanctioned by the Informs board, includes a $2,000 honorarium. It is presented annually to an operations researcher or management scientist whose publications demonstrate a consistently high standard of expository writing.

THE JAPANESE TRANSLATION of Paul Milgrom and John Roberts' Economics, Organization and Management was named 1998 book of the year in economics by the Japanese business magazine Weekly Diamond. A panel of business economists and professors of economics and business broke with tradition when they selected a book by non-Japanese authors. Roberts, the Jonathan B. Lovelace Professor of Economics, and Milgrom, professor of economics and Shirley R. and Leonard W. Ely Jr. Professor of Humanities and Sciences, first published the book in English in 1992 (Prentice Hall). It has since been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Czech, Chinese, and Japanese.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR of Accounting Mary Barth and Associate Professor of Finance Geert Bekaert were awarded tenure, effective September 1, 1998. Barth, who won the School's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1996, studies financial accounting and reporting and is particularly concerned with topics of interest to accounting standard setters. Bekaert's research topics include exchange rate and international interest rate determination, the foreign exchange market, and emerging equity markets.

WHEN NOBEL LAUREATE William Sharpe returned in November to his alma mater, UCLA, to accept that institution's highest honor, the UCLA Medal, the occasion was especially poignant. At the same ceremony, a chair in economic theory was established in the name of Sharpe's mentor and friend, UCLA professor emeritus Armen A. Alchian. Sharpe, who claims to have been so "numbed" by his freshman course in accounting that he switched to economics as a major, was inspired by Alchian. "He taught me how to think like an economist," Sharpe says. Sharpe, the Stanco 25 Professor of Finance, earned his AB, MA, and PhD from UCLA. The institution honored its favorite son "for his meticulous scholarship and diligent work in unraveling fundamental truths about the dynamics of financial economics."