Smith School Announces New Positions and Titles for Faculty Members

With the start of the spring 2024 semester comes new titles and positions for faculty members at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

The Smith School is announcing four endowed chair positions, five area chairs, and two named professors. It is also designating four faculty members as emerging fellows.

Regularly ranked among the best in the world, the Smith School’s faculty continues to foster an intellectual community shaping future business leaders. Smith professors are highly regarded across industries, producing impactful research published in top journals. That impact has translated to 24 faculty members being among the top 2% of most-cited researchers globally in the PLoS Biology ranking. Led by Stanford University, the ranking looks at 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields and ranks researchers for their career-long impact by the number of times their work is cited in other research. It is based on data from Elsevier’s Scopus, an abstract and citation database of research publications.

Additionally, eight faculty members were named as assistant professors: Reuben Hurst and Aneesh Rai in the Management & Organization (M&O) department; Agustin Hurtado in Finance; Eaman Jahani in the Decision, Operations and Information Technologies (DOIT) department; Jingyi Qian and Mark Zakota in Accounting and Information Assurance (AIA); Joseph Reiff in Marketing; and Sining Song in the Logistics, Business and Public Policy (LBPP) department.

The complete list of updated faculty positions and titles is as follows:

Endowed Chairs:

• Amna Kirmani: Dean’s Chair of Marketing, Ralph J. Tyser Professor of Marketing and Area Chair (Marketing)
• Hui Liao: Dean’s Chair Professor of Management (M&O)
• Debra Shapiro: Dean’s Chair in Organizational Behavior (M&O)
• Zhi-Long Chen: Dean’s Chair of Operations Management and Orkand Corporation Professor of Management Science (DOIT)

Emerging Fellows:

• Kunpeng “KZ” Zhang: associate professor (DOIT)
• Evan Starr: associate professor (M&O)
• Sean Cao: associate professor (AIA)
• Bo “Bobby” Zhou: associate professor (Marketing)

Named Professors:

• Balaji Padmanabhan: Dean's Professor of Decisions, Operations & Information Technologies (DOIT)
• Vijaya Venkataramani: Dean's Professor of Leadership and Innovation (M&O)
• Jie Zhang: Dean’s Professor of Marketing and Harvey Sanders Fellow of Retail Management (Marketing)

Area Chairs:

• Cristian Dezső: associate professor (LBPP)
• Michael Kimbrough: professor and LeRoy J. Herbert Fellow (AIA)
• Ilya Ryzhov: professor of management science and operations management (DOIT)
• Subra Tangirala: Dean’s Professor of Management (M&O)
• Geoffrey Tate: Dean’s Professor of Finance (Finance)