Brain gain at University of Alberta.
An intensive recruiting drive has brought these professors to Edmonton from some of the top business schools around the world.
They come from some of the leading business schools on the planet — institutions that command the same level of respect as corporate heavyweights like Apple, IBM and Google.
We’re talking about A-list B-schools here, such as Columbia, Wharton, Penn State, Vanderbilt, Oxford, Rochester, Indiana and Illinois. Every one of these schools holds down a spot in the Financial Times’ 2012 rankings of the top 100 MBA programs in the world.
Indeed, three of them — Columbia, Oxford’s Said Business School and Pennsylvania’s Wharton School — rank in the top 10 and six are listed in the top 50. And now, thanks to an intensive recruiting drive over the past year, a whole crop of new additions from these bigname institutions are faculty members at the University of Alberta’s School of Business.
The new hires are a source of pride for Joseph Doucet, the business school’s affable interim dean who earned his own PhD at the University of California at Berkeley — 14th in FT’s 2012 global MBA school rankings.
“The vision I have for the School of Business is to develop leaders from Alberta for the world. We have to compete on global markets, so we’ve gone out and hired the best and brightest that are available globally,” says Doucet, a respected expert in energy policy.
“This year is an excellent example. We’ve hired nine new faculty members — eight at the junior level and one at the more senior level — and all of them have terrific expertise as well as the ability to bridge research and more applied issues or problems. That will certainly inform policy issues, whether it’s in the area of financial markets, environmental regulations or operations management.”
The opportunity to work closely with Alberta’s energy industry and provincial policy-makers was a key driver behind Emilson Silva’s decision to leave Atlanta’s Georgia Institute of Technology after six years, to join the U of A’s School of Business as a full professor. Silva, who earned a PhD in economics from the University of Illinois and later taught at the University of Oregon, Tulane University in New Orleans and Brazil’s Universidade Catolica de Brasilia, says he has already toured the oilsands and made contact with some key industry players.
“It was clear that there was a strong link between the business school, the Alberta government and industry. So getting involved in discussions on industrial policy and public policy was attractive to me and I didn’t perceive this as a possibility in Georgia,” he says.
Alberta’s booming economy was another draw. Silva’s wife, architect Adriana Marasca, was having a tough time finding work in Atlanta due to the sluggish U.S. economy. But she has already landed a job in Edmonton.
“Some people told us there is a labour shortage here in Alberta, so we thought she may be able to find a job,” he says. “And she has just started working at Manasc Isaac,” a well-respected local architectural firm.
Joel Gehman and Matthew Grimes joined the U of A School of Business as assistant professors in the department of strategic management and organization.
Gehman, who earned his PhD at Penn State after completing a science degree at Cornell, is particularly interested in sustainability issues. Grimes, who earned a doctorate at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University and a master’s degree from Oxford, is focused on social entrepreneurship.
Both academics also have young families and say family considerations factored into their decisions to make the audacious move to the Great White North.
“Edmonton does strike me as an incredibly livable city, and the sense I get — perhaps because I’m a new parent with a 10-month-old daughter — is that there is a strong emphasis on families and family activities, including the festivals,” Grimes says.
Gehman, who has a 10-yearold son and a seven-year-old daughter, echoes those sentiments. Although he has travelled to Ontario and Quebec, he had never been to Western Canada previously and is looking forward to seeing Jasper and Banff for the first time.
“Before we could make the move up my wife had to see the city. So we came up about 10 days before Christmas because I thought she should see the city at its coldest,” he says.
“I figured she would come up, take one look and that would be that. But instead we both really just fell in love with the city, even in the middle of winter. Everyone has been very welcoming.”
Although the U of A may not yet enjoy the kind of global reputation of major U.S. business schools like Columbia or Stanford, Gehman says it is already well-regarded internationally.
“Within the world of academia, Alberta’s reputation is very well known,” he says.
Efstathios (Stathi) Avdis, an expert in financial markets who holds a PhD in finance from Wharton as well as engineering and science degrees from the University of Reading in Britain, Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and Columbia University in New York, is also happy he made the move to Alberta’s top university.
“Sometimes you have to scratch beneath the surface to see what’s really going on, and if you look at the faculty in the department of finance here, you’ll see that it’s actually pretty good,” he says.
For Doucet, it all comes down to nurturing a culture of excellence in research, teaching and external engagement that fosters future leaders among the school’s 2,000 undergrads, 450 MBA students and 65 PhD candidates.
“Our economy is really globally focused and our future leaders need to be tied into that global focus,” he says. “They need to understand how global markets work and how business works globally so they can be the leaders — and the levers — for Alberta’s economy going forward.”