Six Faculty Named to Endowed Chairs

Six Stanford GSB professors have been honored with new endowed chair titles. Honored with new academic titles are Professors Anat Admati, Jonathan Berk, Charles Jones, Dale Miller, Jesper Sørensen, and Sarah Soule.

Anat Admati, a financial economics theorist whose work focuses on issues related to the dissemination of information in financial markets, is the first George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics. She is a recipient of the Batterymarch Fellowship and two awards for best paper.

The chair was created last year by alumni and friends who wanted to pay tribute to Parker, who joined the faculty in 1973 and has served as associate dean and director of most of the School’s academic programs as well as being recognized as an outstanding teacher. Today he is the Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance, Emeritus. Dale Miller, a professor of organizational behavior and director of the school’s Center for Social Innovation, is the first Class of 1968/Ed Zschau Professor of Organizational Behavior, named for the businessman, professor, and former member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

An anonymous donor endowed the chair to honor Zschau, MBA ‘63, MS ‘64, PhD ‘67, who has taught at Stanford GSB, at Harvard Business School, and at Princeton University. He founded and became CEO of the computer products firm Systems Industries. The chair seeks to recognize scholarship in nonprofit management.

Miller is social psychologist who has made contributions to the science of psychology. Recent work has focused on motivations underlying volunteerism and the conditions under which individuals and organizations abandon one course of action and pursue another. Endowed professorships are the highest honor the university can bestow and are crucial to the school’s ability to recruit top scholars by offering recognition of academic achievement. Chairs may be created to honor individuals or organizations and may express a preference to honor a professor working in a specific academic area. At Stanford GSB they also include a distinctive black chair decorated with the university seal.

Jonathan Berk, whose research includes delegated money management, asset pricing, valuing growth potential, and interaction between labor and financial markets, is the new A.P. Giannini Professor of Finance. Berk’s paper, “A Critique of Size-Related Anomalies,” was selected as one of the two best papers ever published in the Review of Financial Studies, and was also honored as one of the 100 seminal papers published by Oxford University Press. The chair was established in 1977 in honor of the founder of the Bank of Italy, the San Francisco institution that became Bank of America.

Macroeconomist Charles (Chad) Jones, whose research includes economic growth, income equality, and most recently macro eco of spending on health care, is the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics. The chair was established in 1993 by group of MBA alumni from the Class of ‘68.

Sarah Soule, who joined the Business School in 2008, is the latest Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior, a chair established in 2002 by John and Tasha Morgridge. John Morgridge, who today is a Business School faculty member, joined Cisco Systems in 1968 as president and CEO, and today serves as Cisco’s chairman. Soule works on the sociology of social movements, addressing the diffusion of social movements and the impact those movements have on share prices of corporations they target. She has shown that the greatest impact on corporations occurs when labor or consumer issues are involved rather than environmental or moral issues.

Jesper Sørensen, the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior, mixes labor market processes with organizational sociology. He specializes in the dynamics of organizational and strategic change, and their implications for individuals and their careers. His work of the dynamics of teams has led to new insights concerning how people respond to changes in the racial composition of their work groups. Sørensen is engaged in a large-scale project on the determinants of entrepreneurial behavior exploring questions such as how work environments shape rates of entrepreneurship. The Kilpatrick chair, created in the 1950s, honors a 1908 U.S. Naval Academy graduate who served as chief of staff for the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic fleet, and earned the Legion of Merit and Gold Star for outstanding service.