Smith School Awarded $1.4 Million Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER)

The Smith School has been awarded a four-year, $1.4 million grant by the U.S. Department of Education to fund a Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER). This high honor designates the Smith School as a national resource center in international business education and research. There are only 31 CIBERs in the nation.

The federal government instituted the CIBER program to increase U.S. competitiveness in the global marketplace by creating useful links between the business and academic communities on international business issues. In addition to programmatic enhancements and faculty research, the Smith School CIBER will support conferences and seminars, training, and consulting to the business community in the mid-Atlantic region as part of its outreach activities.

A key area of concern to international businesses relates to national and homeland security and its implications for enterprise continuity; the Smith School CIBER will provide significant leadership in this area. The Smith Schools Larry Gordon, Ernst & Young Alumni Professor of Managerial Accounting, and Martin Loeb, professor of accounting and information assurance and Deloitte & Touche LLP Faculty Fellow, are already well-known for their research relating to the economics of information security. The Smith School CIBER will combine their work with existing programs and centers in the University of Maryland which deal with national and homeland security. The Smith School CIBER will sponsor its first Conference on Global Security in 2008 to bring together the best scholars in this nascent domain along with leaders from government and business.

The Smith School CIBER will pursue other strategic initiatives as well. The University of Maryland has extensive resources related to language study and research, and the center will leverage those resources to develop business language courses and support the schools International Fellows track of the Undergraduate Fellows Program. Global e-commerce, entrepreneurship and innovation, global services and emerging markets are also among the CIBERs strategic initiatives.

Vinod Jain, PhD 94, senior director of professional programs and director of the Smith School CIBER, thinks the center will have a significant impact on students and faculty as well as the wider business community. The centers outreach activities will give students many more opportunities to interact with global business people, which can only help them as they begin their careers in today's global economy, says Jain.

Students will find that more of their courses contain an international component, compliments of curriculum development grants from the Smith School CIBER. Faculty members will have the opportunity to pursue internationally-focused research in their own disciplines and present their research in international conferences, funded partly by CIBER.