One of the world’s top schools for business research, Maryland Smith also is where students experience top-level teaching in a highly supportive community. Smith chronicles and celebrates this distinction at the end of each academic year by honoring its outstanding faculty and staff members with awards of excellence.

Check out the 19th annual Summer Reading List for Business Leaders, with recommendations from faculty members at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. This year’s list includes new and older books on the Fed, problem-solving, entrepreneurism, memory, vaccines, and human nature, plus fiction picks about saving the planet, war and international spies.

After 30 years in the accounting field, Anoop Mehta ’84 is stepping up to lead the profession into the future. Mehta, a Maryland CPA and former chair of the Maryland Association of CPAs’ Board of Directors, was named chair of the American Institute of CPAs, the world’s largest member organization in the field, during its May 17, 2022 meeting in Austin, Texas. 

The cost of a data breach can be a crippling expense for companies and a looming threat. The world record for the largest payout for a ransomware demand, made by an insurance company this year, now stands at $40 million. That’s why it’s so important for companies to figure out how much they should be spending on cybersecurity, says Maryland Smith’s Lawrence A. Gordon, a widely respected pioneer in cybersecurity economics. 

After two years of COVID-caused disruption, tax season this year ends after the traditional, April 15 statutory date – but with more extensions for some people, and they are not COVID-related. 

Firms are more likely to face accounting-related lawsuits for overstating their earnings or assets than for understating them because it’s easier to demonstrate investor harm with overstatements. So erring on the conservative side can reduce a firm’s legal costs.

Maryland Smith’s Pat McNamee has been reappointed to the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, for a second five-year term, which began on Jan. 1 of this year.

Jennifer Felix ’92 has one goal in mind when it comes to leadership – helping everyone maximize their potential. As president and CEO of ASRC Federal – a Maryland-based government services subsidiary of Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, an Alaska Native Corporation owned by 13,000 Iñupiat shareholders – Felix has learned firsthand what it means to lead. It starts with empowering others and finding inspiration in every journey, she says.