Haas Expands World-Class Faculty

The Haas School is kicking off the fall semester with three new tenured professors from some of the East Coast’s top business schools: new Lester Center Faculty Director Toby Stuart, a management and entrepreneurship professor from Harvard; Professor Ross Levine, from Brown, ranked one of the ten most-cited finance experts in the past decade; and Gustavo Manso, from MIT, who already has won an award teaching full-time Berkeley MBA students since arriving in the spring.

The Berkeley-Haas faculty also has been bolstered by five new assistant professors and more than a dozen new lecturers and visiting faculty.

“We continue to hire at the very top of the faculty market,” says Haas Dean Rich Lyons. “It is a part of what’s making us stronger and stronger. Great faculty attracts great students and great staff─a virtuous circle, and we are in it.”

Toby Stuart

Toby Stuart, a visiting professor at Haas from Harvard for the past two years, officially joined the faculty’s Management of Organizations (MORS) Group this summer. He holds the Leo Helzel Chair in Entrepreneurship.

Stuart’s research focuses on social networks, venture capital networks, and the role of networks in the creation of new firms. He is the recipient of the 2007 Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship, granted every other year to recognize an individual’s contributions to entrepreneurship research. Stuart also received the Administrative Science Quarterly’s Scholarly Contribution (best paper) award.

Stuart says one of his goals is to develop the curriculum’s aim to teach students to think like entrepreneurs regardless of their fields. “Even if they don’t plan to launch a startup company, students can learn how to use innovation to strengthen organizations in any field,” says Stuart, who earned his PhD from Stanford and his AB, summa cum laude, in economics from Carleton College.

Ross Levine

Professor Ross Levine, previously at Brown University’s economics department, is the Haas School’s new Willis H. Booth Chair in Banking and Finance, and a member of the Economic Analysis and Policy Group.

Levine’s just-released book, Guardians of Finance: Making Regulators Work for Us, with James Barth and Gerard Caprio critiques the role of U.S. and international regulators in causing global financial crises and proposes strategies for improving their performance.

Levine’s primary research examines how financial sector regulations and the operation of financial systems affect economic growth and poverty, economic stability, and the distribution of income and economic opportunities. His scope ranges from international finance to entrepreneurship, including the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. He has published more than 100 articles.

Levine is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as a senior fellow at the Milken Institute. He received his PhD in economics from UCLA after graduating Phi Beta Kappa in economics from Cornell.

Gustavo Manso
Haas Finance Group Associate Professor Gustavo Manso arrived at Haas in January 2012 and, after just one semester, students in his MBA corporate finance students nominated him for a teaching award. Manso previously taught for five years at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

In 2010, Manso received the Swiss Finance Institute’s Outstanding Paper Award. He was also honored with the Review of Financial Studies Young Researcher Award in 2009. As co-founder of the Finance Theory Group, Manso helps foster theoretical research in the areas of corporate finance, financial institutions, and financial markets.

Studying financial incentives, Manso’s research has revealed that combining tolerance for early failure with reward for long-term success is effective in motivating both creativity and innovation.

Manso earned his PhD in Finance from Stanford, an MS in mathematics from the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada in Brazil; and his BA in economics from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Brazil.

New assistant professors, visiting faculty, and lecturers

Berkeley-Haas also is welcoming five new assistant professors: Andreea Gorbatai; Jose Guajardo; Alexander Nezlobin; Sameer Srivastava; and Brett Green.

  • Andreea Gorbatai, who has a PhD in organizational behavior and an MBA in sociology from Harvard, studies social structures and mechanisms of collective production, open innovation, and collective entrepreneurship.
  • Jose Guajardo, PhD from Wharton, focuses his research on service operations, supply chain management, operations strategy, and business analytics.
  • Alexander Nezlobin, who earned his PhD at Stanford and a BS in applied Mathematics from the St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University in Russia, studies equity valuation, managerial performance measurement, profitability analysis, and monopoly regulation.
  • Sameer Srivastava, who earned his PhD in organizational behavior and sociology from Harvard, studies network analysis, culture and cognition, and research design and methods.
  • Brett Green, previously a visiting professor at Haas from Northwestern, earned his PhD at Stanford and studies information and sports economics, including news and liquidity in markets when traders have different information.

The Haas faculty also will be strengthened by four visiting professors:

  • Haas alumnus Nicholas Economides, PhD 81, a visiting professor from NYU’s Stern School of Business, is an internationally recognized academic authority on network economics, electronic commerce and public policy and has published more than 100 articles in top trade journals.
  • Hanno Lustig, visiting associate professor from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, won the 2009 Terker Family Prize (First Prize) for a co-authored paper on risk factors in currency markets and the 2010 NASDAQ OMX award for the best paper on asset pricing.
  • Adair Morse, visiting professor from the University of Chicago, studies tax evasion and corporate fraud as well as equity markets, including activist investors and performance in private equity.
  • Annette Vissing-Jorgensen, visiting professor from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, studies household consumption and portfolio choice, stock market participation, returns to entrepreneurial investment, and corporate governance.

In addition, a well-rounded group of lecturers will be joining Haas this fall:

  • Ajay Bam, a former senior product manager at Nokia who also has more than 10 years of experience with startups, is teaching the undergraduate Introduction to Entrepreneurship course.
  • Colin Boyle a San Francisco-based partner and managing director with The Boston Consulting Group is teaching the MBA course Strategic Management of Nonprofit Organizations.
  • Asiff Hirji, a Partner with TPG Capital with a specialization in financial services, technology and e-commerce and formerly president of TD AMERITRADE, and Theodore Kuh, BS 82, former managing director and global head of Citigroup’s retail industry, are co-teaching Private Equity: from LBOs to Emerging Markets.
  • Don Howard, head of the San Francisco office of the Bridgespan Group, an advisor for nonprofits, will co-teach Advanced Social Sector Solutions.
  • Bhavik Joshi, BCEMBA 08, co-founder of an early-stage startup and senior fellow at Haas’ Lester Center for Entrepreneurship, and Bob Neher, a founding partner, president, and CEO of St. Ives Laboratories beauty care products and CEO of Botalia Pharmaceuticals, will co-teach Advanced Entrepreneurship in the Berkeley-Columbia Executive MBA Program.
  • Safwan Shah, an executive with Total Systems, which processes electronic payments for financial and nonfinancial institutions, is co-teaching Entrepreneurship in the Evening & Weekend MBA Program.
  • Brian Steel, executive in residence in the Cleantech to Market Program with 30 years of business innovation and leadership experience, is co-teaching the MBA course.
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