In their seven-week experiential learning projects, master’s of quantitative finance students are given a task that realistically would take many months to accomplish. That’s intentional, says Maryland Smith’s Clifford Rossi. In academics as in life, the most arduous challenges are often the ones that teach us the most.

Eight faculty members earned Maryland Smith teaching honors last week, as part of an annual tradition at the business school. Tunay Tunca, chair of Maryland Smith's Teaching Excellence Committee, announced the faculty teaching awards during a virtual spring faculty and staff assembly. Tunca is the Dean's Professor of Management Science and Operations Management at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at University of Maryland. Special Recognition: Tricia Homer

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler is looking to the future – one oriented around the intersection of finance and technology, climate change and human capital. Gensler's remarks opened the eighth annual Conference on Financial Market Regulation, which offers a forum for leaders from academia, government, the financial sector, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to discuss regulatory policies and relevant industry topics.

Maryland Smith affiliated professor Michele Gelfand, known for her studies of how cultures adapt to external threats, has been elected as one of 120 new members and 30 international members of the National Academy of Sciences.

At Maryland Smith’s annual TechFest, speaker Jesse Hwang opened his presentation with a warning. “The COVID-19 crisis has forced banks and their customers to use digital tools and processes to compensate for branch, office and call center closures,” said Hwang,  a senior manager of cyber technical at Capital One. “This embarking on a cloud and digital transformation journey makes banks lucrative targets for cyber-criminals, who treated the pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime gold rush.”

The University of Maryland is aiming to add more than 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty from underrepresented backgrounds over the next decade with a new commitment of $40 million across schools and colleges. The FAMILE program—Faculty Advancement at Maryland for Inclusive Learning and Excellence—represents a near-tripling of support for several existing recruitment and retention programs aimed at improving diversity among faculty across campus.

P. K. Kannan, the Dean’s Chair in Marketing Science at Maryland Smith, has been inducted as a fellow of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC), a recognition of outstanding contributions to the scholarship and practice of marketing and contributions to EMAC.

New research from Maryland Smith’s Margrét Bjarnadóttir that asks how organizations can leverage AI to build a more equitable workforce has been named the Best White Paper in the 2021 Wharton Analytics Conference.

Maryland Smith’s Department of Decision, Operations & Information Technologies is getting ready for TechFest. The annual forum brings together industry leaders who are at the forefront of addressing cybersecurity and privacy issues using modern tools. This year’s industry speakers will include Jesse Hwang, a senior manager of cyber technical in the financial sector, and Lahar Mishra, MS ’19, a technical risk management analyst at Verizon Media.

A study of the world’s top researchers identifies 18 from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business in the top 2% of the most-cited scholars and scientists worldwide.