Faculty Awards and Honors

Larry Bodin, professor emeritus of management science, and Michael Fu,professor of management science, were both elected as INFORMS (The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Fellows.

Rebecca Hamilton, associate professor of marketing, and Roland Rust, David Bruce Smith chair in marketing, executive director of the Center for Excellence in Service, and chair of the Smith’s marketing department, were awarded the 2007 Don Lehmann Award for the Best Dissertation-Based Research Article in the Journal of Marketing or Journal of Marketing Research. Their article, written with co-author Debora Thompson, is entitled "Feature Fatigue: When Product Capabilities Become Too Much of a Good Thing."

P. K. Kannan, Harvey Sanders associate professor of marketing and director of the Center of Excellence in Service, had his paper, “Pricing Digital Products: A Model and Application for National Academy Press,” named as one of four finalists for the 2007 INFORMS Society for Marketing Science Practice Prize competition.

Subra Tangirala, assistant professor of management and organization, was recently selected as the winner of SIOP’s 2008 S. Rains Wallace Dissertation Award, given to the person who completes the best doctoral dissertation research within the field of I-O psychology.

Sue White, Distinguished Tyser Teaching Fellow in finance, has been inducted into the Academy for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland.

Editorial Appointments

Gilad Chen, associate professor of management and organization, has accepted an invitation to become associate editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology,

Jie Zhang, assistant professor of marketing, was appointed to the Editorial Review Board of Journal of Marketing.

Arjang Assad Named Dean’s Professor for Extraordinary Service

Arjang Assad, professor of management science, has been appointed Dean’s Professor for Extraordinary Service. Assad is the first member of the Smith School to be honored with this title.

This newly created honor is reserved for faculty demonstrating extraordinary service on multiple levels, including the application of intellectual skills to issues of public concern and exceptional leadership in local and campus-wide faculty governance.

Assad came to Smith as an assistant professor in 1978 after he received his PhD in management science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has served as Smith’s senior associate dean, chair of the Decision and Information Technologies department and director of QUEST, an undergraduate honors fellowship program.

His early research focused on operations and distribution, working with a group of colleagues at the forefront of vehicle routing, resolving distribution and supply chain issues.

In his recent work, Assad has partnered with Smith professor emeritus Saul Gass, capturing the history of operations research. This partnership has resulted in several articles, one published book, titled is titled “An Annotated Timeline of Operations Research” (Springer, 2005), and a second book in the works.

Assad has chaired the INFORMS History & Traditions Committee and served on the editorial boards of several leading journals, including Operations Research, Transportation Science, Production and Operations Management,and the INFORMS Journal on Computing.

Assad has seen Smith and the University of Maryland grow and change throughout the years.  He is particularly proud that Smith has become a top-tier university in the past decade under Dean Howard Frank’s guidance. “I’m proud of how Smith has advanced and shown the capacity and capability to grow very quickly,” says Assad. “It isn’t very easy to compete in the evolving business school market without compromising the quality of education offered.”

As for the future, Assad says he will continue to take on leadership roles inside and outside of Smith. He relishes interaction with faculty across diverse disciplines.

“Even though I’ve been at Smith for a long time, it always presents me with new challenges,” says Assad. “The great thing about this school is that I can always engage myself in new things, keep my roles fresh. Things never get boring or stale.”