Assistant Professor Kiera Hudson studies schadenfreude and the psychological and biological roots of power hierarchies.
Assistant Professor Sa-kiera “Kiera” Hudson has received a 2024 National Science Foundation CAREER award, the NSF’s most prestigious awards program in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.
Hudson said she is thrilled to receive the award and will use the $850,000 grant to fund new research on schadenfreude, which is pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune.
Empathy is often hailed as the emotion to target in intergroup conflicts, as it predicts consequential behaviors that can help reduce inequality, said Hudson, who earned a PhD in the (social) psychology department at Harvard University in 2020. “In many social conflicts, people struggle to feel empathy for those not part of their social groups,” she said. But in the study of empathy, behavioral scientists have perhaps overlooked schadenfreude’s relevance to conflict among groups of people, which is why it’s crucial to learn more, she said.
“If we better understand what drives intergroup schadenfreude—and the consequences—we can better understand how to design interventions to decrease the harm it causes, particularly to marginalized groups,” she said.
How schadenfreude harms
In her new research project, Hudson, a member of the Management of Organizations Group (MORS) at Haas, will investigate how schadenfreude contributes to harm, attempting to understand the cognitive mechanisms that allow it to flourish. The project will put a strong emphasis on research and education, including training minoritized scientists, collaborating with organizations focused on equity and social justice, and disseminating research to interdisciplinary communities.
Hudson said her goal is to bring a broader understanding of people’s more “nasty, harmful behaviors,” at a particular time in history.
“Across the world, there has been an increase in rigid beliefs of who belongs to ‘us’ versus ‘them’ fueled by perceived threat and competition, leading to intensified intergroup animosity,” she said. “These are the exact conditions under which schadenfreude thrives, suggesting that we are not only in an empathy deficit as a nation, as proposed by Obama in 2006, but perhaps also in a schadenfreude surplus.”
More broadly, Hudson’s research at Haas is focused on two main areas: the psychological and biological roots of power hierarchies, and how these hierarchies intersect to influence experiences and perceptions.
Professor Nancy Wallace, a national expert on real estate finance and strategy, mortgage-related securities, and pricing models, has received the 2024 John M. Quigley Award—the highest honor of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association (AREUEA).
Prof. Nancy Wallace
The award, named for the late Berkeley Haas professor emeritus and leading urban economics scholar John M. Quigley, recognizes scholars who best represent the ways in which Quigley advanced the academic fields of real estate, urban economics, public finance, and regional science.
“The medalist must have produced a record of scholarship that opens up new avenues of inquiry, have a demonstrated record of mentorship of young scholars, have supported institutional advances within these fields, or have been particularly effective at dissemination of these fields to public and professional practices,” said Stijn Van Neiuwerburgh, outgoing president of AREUEA. “Nancy embodies all of the ideal traits of the Quigley Medal winner.”
Wallace has been at Berkeley Haas since 1986, where she is the Lisle and Roslyn Payne Chair in Real Estate Capital Markets, chair of the Haas Real Estate Group, and co-chair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, and directs the Real Estate and Financial Markets Laboratory.She is a national leader in her field, having served as an advisor to the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury on financial crises and reform. Her research focus includes residential house price dynamics, mortgage contract design and pricing, securitization and asset backed security pricing and hedging, lease contract design and pricing, methods to underwrite energy efficiency in commercial mortgages, and valuation models for executive stock options.
On campus, Wallace received the 2021 Williamson Award, the top faculty honor at Berkeley Haas, and earned the Berkeley Faculty Service Award in 2019 for work helping the campus navigate complex financial and real estate issues.
Wallace will receive the award and discuss her scholarship as the keynote speaker for the 2024 Midyear National AREUEA conference in May.
Dean Ann Harrison was named 2023 Dean of the Year by Poets and Quants. Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small.
Berkeley Haas Dean Ann Harrison, a renowned economist lauded for keeping Berkeley Haas’ six business programs ranked among the world’s best and significantly expanding the breadth and depth of the faculty, has been named Dean of the Year by Poets & Quants.
Poets & Quants Editor-in-Chief John Byrne announced the news to a global audience at a Thinkers50 virtual conference today. Byrne engaged in a sweeping conversation with Harrison that covered the impact of globalization on workers, the responsibilities of government and business in fighting climate change, the critical role of diversity on campus, and the enduring importance of the MBA.
“The MBA is a wonderful degree,” Harrison said. “It combines the rigor of statistics, data analysis, hard-core quant skills with skills like how to work with people, marketing, and how to sell,” she said. “What’s wonderful about an MBA is that it allows you to combine these different skills. Other degrees don’t offer that combination.” Haas MBA students care about making an impact, she added, “not just a great paycheck.”
Harrison has amassed an unimaginable and nearly breathtaking record of achievement. —John Byrne, Poets & Quants
In his Poets & Quants article, published today, Byrne wrote that Harrison has amassed an “unimaginable and nearly breathtaking record of achievement” during her four-and-a-half years as dean. Harrison, who has led Haas since January 2019 and was reappointed to a second term last February, said she was “deeply humbled” by the honor.
“I am so lucky to be surrounded by a tremendous community at Haas—students, staff, faculty, and alumni who are always going beyond themselves,” she said. “It’s only together that we can seek solutions to climate change, build a more inclusive society, and fuel innovation in all its forms. This is a business school that embodies excellence. I feel great pride in our past and am thrilled to have the opportunity to create impact for the future.”
Harrison is the second woman to lead Haas; Professor Laura Tyson served previously. As the former director of development policy at the World Bank and a longtime professor, Harrison has focused her research on international trade and global labor markets.
Big Changes
Since joining Haas from Wharton, Harrison has made big changes, Byrne noted. She has led a major diversity, equity, inclusion, justice & belonging (DEIJB) effort, broadening the profile of the Haas faculty, school board, and the student body. The school’s entering full-time MBA class this year is 41% women, 47% U.S. minorities, and 13% U.S. underrepresented minorities overall.
Harrison has woven sustainability content deep into the curriculum while maintaining the school’s historical focus on entrepreneurship and innovation.
“The challenges of climate change permeate all aspects of business: supply chain, economics, management, and finance,” she said. “In the latter field, we have pioneered new ways of investing. We need to hire in all these dimensions. It is a big agenda and we are making a lot of progress in a lot of different ways.”
Harrison also oversaw the launch of the first Flex online MBA cohort at any top business school. Applying learnings from the pandemic, Haas used new technology to make the MBA available to expanded groups of international students and working parents who require flexible schedules.
Under Harrison’s leadership, Haas also stepped up fundraising, raising a record total of $227 million, including $56.1 million during the last fiscal year. The school also secured the largest single gift in the school’s history—$30 million from alumnus Ned Spieker, BS 66, and his wife, Carol, BS 66—to turn the undergraduate program into a four-year program.
Figuring it out together
In the Poets & Quants article, Courtney Chandler, Chief Strategy & Operating Officer and Senior Assistant Dean at Haas, noted that Harrison “hasn’t stayed in one lane as dean.”
“She’s ambitious, and she sees the full potential of Haas within UC Berkeley and is driven to realize that potential,” she said. “She has not been that one-dimensional dean and that is incredibly impressive.”
“She’s ambitious, and she sees the full potential of Haas within UC Berkeley and is driven to realize that potential.” —Senior Assistant Dean Courtney Chandler
Harrison’s record as a highly cited scholar has also helped her lead the school’s professors, Byrne said.
“It’s hard to get faculty to buy-in to a dean’s vision, but she has been able to do that effectively,” Erika Walker, senior assistant dean for instruction, who has been at Haas for nearly 20 years, told Byrne. “She relates so well to them…. Ann is very thoughtful about where we should be going. A lot of her success stems from her ability to get the buy-in and then enlist others to figure it out together.”
Professor Catherine Wolfram (left) talks with Dean Ann Harrison (center) and Professor Ulrike Malmendier (right) at a Dean’s Speaker Series event.
During her second term, Harrison said she will continue to work with her team to build upon the school’s academic excellence as well as the student experience at Haas. One important goal is to ensure that the school’s degree programs remain the best in the world, she said.
Harrison earned her BA from UC Berkeley in economics and history, and her PhD from Princeton University. She held previous professorships in UC Berkeley’s College of Agricultural and Resource Economics, as well as at Columbia University and the Wharton School, where she was the William H. Wurster Professor of Management.
An avid hiker, Harrison told Poets & Quants that returning to UC Berkeley and California has allowed her to use time off to explore the state’s cliff-lined beaches, redwood forest, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, “a paradise for those who love the outdoors.”
Harrison is the 13th dean and the third woman to be named Dean of the Year by Poets & Quants, which covers business school education.
Professor Emeritus Pablo Spiller (right) accepted the 2023 Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Award in August at the SIOE’s annual conference in Frankfurt, Germany.
The award is given biennially to a researcher who has made “sustained significant academic contributions to institutional and organizational economics.” It is named for Indiana University political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Berkeley Haas Professor Oliver Williamson.
Professor Emeritus Pablo Spiller
Spiller is the Jeffrey A. Jacobs Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Business & Technology at the Haas School, as well as a UC Berkeley professor of graduate studies.
Spiller’s research lies at the intersection of economics, politics, and the law, and spans political economy, industrial organization, the economics of regulation and antitrust, and regulatory issues in developing countries. One research stream analyzed the hazards inherent to public contracting, and how it differs from private contracting. Spiller applied the approach to such areas as utility regulation, the organization of bureaucracies, and the inner workings of public companies.
In addition to his academic work, Spiller has consulted for the World Bank, the InterAmerican Bank, the UNDP and multiple governments and private companies throughout the world on the design and implementation of appropriate regulatory policies, contract design and implementation. He has also testified in numerous international arbitrations involving contract, regulatory and investment disputes. He is the former President of the International Society for New Institutional Economics (now SIOE).
Spiller served as the Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor of the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization for 19 years, and held multiple Editorial appointments at a variety of academic journals. On special leave from Berkeley, he served as a Special Advisor to the Bureau of Economics of the US Federal Trade Commission.
Professor Jennifer Chatman has won a lifetime achievement award for “research on culture that has changed the field of organizational behavior,” according to an announcement from the Academy of Management’s Organizational Behavior Division.
Professor Jennifer Chatman
Chatman, the Paul J. Cortese Distinguished Professor of Management and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Berkeley Haas, will receive the award at the OB@AOM conference in Boston next month.
Chatman has “pioneered new theoretical and conceptual approaches to the topic and continues to do so. She also has been a strong mentor to many doctoral students over the years. Finally, beyond her own work and the work of her students, she has contributed to the field as an editor…and editorial board member at almost all of our top journals,” according to the announcement.
In the early 1990s, Chatman co-created the field’s leading quantitative research tool, the Organizational Culture Profile, with Charles O’Reilly, MBA 71, PhD 75, and Dave Caldwell. It illustrated how organizational culture can be quantified, has defined the agenda for the scientific study of culture for decades, and remains the most robust and reliable measure of organizational culture to date.
In nominating Chatman, colleagues noted that she “owns the topic” of culture research and is a “household name” in the field. They also noted that her achievements span beyond being purely scholarly: “For more than 30 years, Jenny has been one of those rare scholars who are triple threats. They are able to be world class scholars over time even as they are leaders in our profession and their host institution,” describing her as “an icon in the field of organizational behavior, as a scholar, as an instructor, and as a mentor. Her career stretches long, well over 30 years, and during that time her work has been nothing short of pathbreaking” and the “ultimate exemplar of a completely involved modern OB researcher, educator, and contributor to the larger world of work and working.”
Chatman will continue to expand her leadership when she steps into the role of interim dean this fall, filling from October-December while Dean Ann Harrison is on sabbatical.
The award is given biennially to a scholar who has made a seminal contribution to the development of the field of regulatory studies.
“As an American, it’s a great honor to have my work on regulation, much of which has focused on Europe, be recognized by an association of European scholars,” said Vogel.
Vogel, who holds the Soloman P. Lee Chair Emeritus in Business Ethics, has focused his career on subjects ranging from regulating health, safety, and environmental risks in Europe and the United States to global challenges in responsible business. He has examined the differences between environmental policy in the United States compared to that of the European Union. In his book, “The Politics of Precaution: Regulating, Health, Safety and Environmental Risks in Europe and the United States” (Princeton University Press, 2012), he decribed how the U.S. and the E.U. “flip-flopped their position in risk regulation: Whereas before the 1990s the US had often the stricter standards, nowadays EU standards are stricter in many instances,” said Professor Eva Ruffing of Germany’s Osnabrück University, in a speech presenting the award.
Vogel is the author of eight other books, including “California Greenin’: How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader” (Princeton University Press, 2018). Other books include: ; “Global Challenges in Responsible Business” (Cambridge University Press, 2010); and “The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility” (Brookings, 2005).
Vogel has taught both Ethics & Responsibility in Business at Haas and Public and Private Global Business Regulation at UC Berkeley. Since 1982, he has served as editor of Berkeley Haas’ management journal, The California Management Review. He has taught classes and lectured on environment management in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
Associate Professor Ricardo Perez-Truglia and Assistant Professor Anastassia Fedyk were selected from more than 1,500 nominations from business schools around the world. Berkeley Haas was one of just four schools with two faculty members on the list.
Ricardo Perez-Truglia
Perez-Truglia, a behavioral economist who has been at Haas since 2020, grew up in the Ciudadela neighborhood near Buenos Aires, Argentina. He conducts economics research on various topics including behavioral economics, public economics, labor economics, and political economy. Currently, he is working on “a new project to understand how employers become aware of gender pay gaps among their employees and how they respond to such information.
“Ricardo is one of the most impactful professors I have learned from in my educational career,” wrote student Lauren Gamboa, MBA 25, in her nomination. “He takes complex economic concepts and breaks down the core elements and key intuitions for application into our everyday professional and personal lives. He has influenced how I evaluate potential projects and my overall learning process.”
Asked what he loves most about teaching, Perez-Truglia says, “I have a lot of fun during my lectures. By the end, I may be exhausted, but the experience is incredibly rewarding.” He adds, “I hope that when my students think about price elasticity, they can hear an Argentinean accent in their minds.”
Anastassia Fedyk
Fedyk’s research lies at the intersection of behavioral finance and innovation, employing big data techniques to better understand such important and timely topics as how artificial intelligence affects modern firms. In her teaching, she has been recognized for taking the lead on bringing more sustainability content into the core finance curriculum.
“Anastassia Fedyk has been the best Professor of my Executive MBA program,” wrote Oleksandr Krotenko, MBA 23, in his nomination. “The students truly love her because they feel how deeply she cares about their growth by always transforming even what might seem like less appealing subjects into life-learning experiences.”
When she is not teaching, Fedyk is co-leader of Economists for Ukraine, a group she founded in response to the Russian invasion of her native home. It informs policy on sanctions against Russia, spearheads plans for the reconstruction of Ukraine, supports Ukraine’s education sector, and organizes humanitarian aid on the ground.
“I am grateful for my Ukrainian heritage,” Fedyk told Poets&Quants. “Over the last year and a half, I have been incredibly proud to come from such a beautiful and resilient place.”
Associate Professor Ned Augenblick, a behavioral economist who studies the ways in which people systematically stray from rational thinking, has received the 2023 Williamson Award—the highest faculty honor at the Haas School of Business.
Ned Augenblick
The award is bestowed on the faculty member who best exemplifies the school’s highest values, including excellence in research, teaching, and service to the school. It is named for long-time faculty member and Nobel Laureate Oliver Williamson, who died in 2020.
Augenblick, the 7th recipient of the award, received multiple nominations from faculty colleagues who cited his contributions as a “super citizen” of the school. His leadership was particularly appreciated in helping to bring new faculty to Haas and his work on school culture.
At Haas since 2010, Augenblick holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University and teaches strategy and game theory in the MBA programs. His research employs theoretical models and experimental data to study deviations from rational thinking in a wide range of settings, from the voting booth to the stock market.
Kanyinsola Aibana and Danielle Dhillon, both MBA 22
Kanyinsola Aibana and Danielle Dhillon, both MBA 22, will travel to Germany and Poland this summer to participate in Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE), an intensive 12-day program for students studying business, journalism, law, medicine, or religion.
Fellows learn about the roles played by people in their professions in Nazi Germany, and explore the ethical issues facing those professions today. Daily seminars are led by specialized faculty who engage fellows in discussions and critical thinking about both the historical and the contemporary.
We interviewed both students about the fellowship.
What led you to apply to the FASPE Fellowship?
Kanyinsola: I applied to the FASPE Fellowship because it would allow me to go beyond my core Ethics course and explore practical ways to address ethical issues as a business leader. I was intrigued by the structure and setting of FASPE, which provides a unique opportunity to delve into topics in business ethics, both historical and contemporary, and a forum to engage and learn from fellows from different graduate programs to create a genuinely enriching and impactful experience. FASPE will serve as a great capstone to my MBA.
Danielle: I applied to the FASPE fellowship because I truly see it as a culmination of my educational journey. I’ve always enjoyed my ethics and philosophy classes in undergrad and here at Haas. In college I minored in German and had the chance to study parts of the German economy via my finance and international business major. Being part of the FASPE Business Fellows community will give me a community to share with and learn from as we examine the role of business and capitalism in making the world a better place through a lens of the harm that it once contributed to.
What do you hope to take away from the trip?
Kanyinsola: I hope to take away tools to help me resolve, avoid, or prepare for the nuanced ethical issues I will face as a business leader. In addition, I hope to leverage the multidisciplinary discussions and different perspectives of other fellows to examine and better understand the actions and complicity of business executives during Nazi Germany and other contexts to reinforce my professional responsibility to promote ethical and moral decision-making.
Danielle: I hope to take away a renewed sense of what business ethics can and should look like, particularly given the ambiguity created by context and time. I hope to walk away with a better understanding of how systemic evil can make it impossible to make the right choices, especially for businesses. But I also am eager to hear stories of businesses that did the right thing—because we don’t tend to focus on those or have good, accessible examples of what ethical business leadership looks like.
How does the fellowship align with your career goals?
Kanyinsola: I aspire to be a business leader in the sustainable food and agricultural space. I am driven by a desire to promote individual well-being by facilitating access to nutritious food products while minimizing the detrimental impact of large-scale food production on the climate and environment. While I hope to be an innovator in this arena, I anticipate tension will sometimes arise in balancing my ultimate mission with the fiscal responsibilities of running a business. I want to be a business leader who continuously reflects upon and confronts ethical issues in all aspects of my business operations. FASPE will provide a great foundation to accomplish this goal.
Danielle: I came to Haas to pivot to a career in impact investing, where I will be responsible for advising and structuring investments that have a double or triple bottom line. In July I’ll be joining the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation where I’ll source, evaluate, and select early stage, high impact social entrepreneurs to support via the model of venture philanthropy. This fellowship will give me an additional lens to truly become a prudent impact investor because business isn’t inherently ethical or unethical: business will always have the ability to perpetuate good or harm. An ethical capital allocator needs to be able to dissect and understand the potential harms as well as see the bigger picture if they choose to go forward.
Junaid Lughmani, MBA 23, speaks during the the Pat Tillman Foundation’s annual Tillman Honors event held Nov. 4 in Chicago.
Junaid Lughmani, MBA 23, was honored by the Pat Tillman Foundation last week for his work on “Digital Dunkirk,” a massive online effort by military veterans to help evacuate at-risk Afghans following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The annual Tillman Honors are named for Pat Tillman, the former NFL player who tragically died in Afghanistan while serving in the U.S. Army in 2004. The event gathered hundreds of supporters, investors, Tillman Scholars, and others in Chicago on Nov. 4 to celebrate Tillman’s legacy of service and leadership. The Foundation’s 2021 Champion Award went to Afghan politician and women’s rights activist Fawzia Koofi. Previous Champion award recipients include Sen. John McCain and former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords & Sen. Mark Kelly.
Lughmani, Kate Hoit, and Rick Schumacher, who are among 60 Tillman Scholars chosen in 2021, accepted the “Make Your Mark” award on behalf of the Digital Dunkirk organizers. The Washington Post featured Lughmani’s work with former Green Beret Jon Reed in Berkeley in an Aug. 26 article. The pair joined veterans, active-duty service members, former government officials, and civil servants who volunteered to help Afghans flee Taliban retaliation.
How do we value hope?
Lughmani, a first-generation American of Pashtun origin, worked as an interpreter in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2012, serving as a liaison between the U.S. and Afghan governments. He later returned to Afghanistan with the U.S. Army as an infantry officer, leading his platoon on multiple combat missions.
In his speech during the awards ceremony, Lughmani said that while in Afghanistan he received “the greatest gifts of love, generosity, care, and goodness from the people.” “From the children who would call me “kaka” (uncle) to the elders who treated me as their own son, Afghans embraced us, broke bread with us, and truly taught us the power of human connection.”
Watch Junaid Lughmani’s speak during the annual Tillman Honors (begins at 39:57 minutes.)
Lughmani, who sought an MBA with a plan to return to Afghanistan as an investor to help grow the country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, spoke of how torn he was in the days when he began his MBA classes as the Taliban reclaimed power in Afghanistan.
“As I sat through valuation lecturers and read through spreadsheets and assessments I wondered: how do we value hope?” he said. “Our dreams cannot be summed up by a formula in a little box. Our hearts belong in the in-between spaces. The Afghans who changed my life stepped out into the in-between spaces. If they could do that, given all they were up against, I decided that I would also choose the in-between spaces. I’d work with whoever showed up, to help as many people as we could.”
With winter fast approaching, more than half the population of Afghanistan is at risk of running short of food.
“The evacuation efforts are ongoing, and there is a desperate food crisis in Afghanistan with 23 million people at risk of facing starvation through the winter,” Lughmani said. “But refugees also need our help. There are over 50,000 refugees who are currently housed on U.S. military installations across the U.S. with little to no belongings; many possess only the clothing on their backs and about half of these refugees are children.”
Uniting B-school forces
Responding to military housing conditions, Lughmani and fellow members of the Haas Veterans Club launched a drive to collect clothing, household appliances, toys, personal care items, electronics, books, and baby supplies, for relocated Afghan refugees in Northern California.
The Haas Veterans Club, holding the Afghan flag, organized the collection drive for evacuated Afghans now living in Northern California.
So far, they’ve collected over 3,000 items, Lughmani said. “Our donations go directly to refugees, cutting through the red tape typical of NGOs that have a more complicated aid-delivering process,” he said. “Our way enables us to identify communities that need help and respond directly through our military, veteran, and Afghan networks.”
The club is reaching out to veterans at other business schools nationwide to expand the effort. To date, veterans’ groups at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, NYU Stern, USC’s Marshall School of Business, University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, UCLA’s Anderson School of Business, University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Business have signed on, and conversations continue with more schools.
The Berkeley Haas collection drive, located on the second floor of Chou Hall, is planned until Nov. 19, but may continue through the holidays, depending on need.
The Berkeley Haas Evening & Weekend MBA Program will host a kickoff event Nov. 9 for a new fellowship program aimed at increasing access to business leadership and scholarships for historically underrepresented groups.
The program, launched through a partnership between Haas and the SF/Bay Area chapter of the National Black MBA Association (NBMBAA), includes networking and mentorship, as well as the opportunity to be selected for a $50,000 scholarship. The scholarship award is more than 50% higher than most scholarship awards to students in part-time MBA programs.
Joe Handy, president of the National Black MBA Association, will speak at the Nov. 9 kickoff.
The kickoff event, to be held in Chou Hall’s Spieker Forum from 6-8 p.m., will feature guest speakers Joe Handy, president of the National Black MBA Association; Myisha Robertson, president and CEO of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the National Black MBA Association; and Élida Bautista, Chief Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Officer at Haas. A panel discussion with Berkeley Haas alumni and members of the SF Black MBA Association will follow.
Elida Bautista, chief DEI officer at Haas, will speak at the NBMBAA event.
“We’re so excited to be partnering with the local chapter of the NBMBAA,” said Jenny Clare, senior associate director of admissions for the Berkeley Haas EWMBA Program. “The Berkeley Haas Equity scholarship will help us to continue to increase the diversity of the applicant pool, and, as a result, increase the diversity of student enrollment in our program.”
As an SF Black MBA Fellow, students will:
Become a member of the SF Bay Area Chapter of the NBMBAA and be assigned a mentor who will provide counsel, connections, and guidance throughout their MBA study.
Join a cohort and community of other fellowship recipients and their mentors in the inaugural class of SF Black MBA Fellows, which will begin in Fall 2022 and extend through their time in the Berkeley Haas EWMBA program and beyond.
Meet regularly with other SF Black MBA Fellows and mentors, network with the SF chapter and Haas leadership, and have exclusive opportunities to connect with Bay Area business leaders.
Be considered for one of the $50,000 Berkeley Haas Equity Scholarships, which will be awarded to SF Black MBA Fellows who exemplify commitment to increasing opportunities and access for underrepresented groups. The number of awards will depend on the applicant pool, and is estimated at two-to-four scholarships of $50,000 each, distributed over three years.
Funding for the new scholarships was provided by Jamie Breen, assistant dean of the school’s MBA Programs for Working Professionals.
“We’ve been thinking about scholarship support to increase the diversity of our working-professional student population for a while, but it’s hard to get these things started,” she said. “I have the capability to do it, so this seemed like a great place to use my philanthropy.”
New scholarships will help increase applicant diversity, according to Jamie Breen, assistant dean of MBA Programs for Working Professionals.
Interested new applicants should apply for the fellowship at the time they apply to Berkeley Haas, well before the final deadline of May 2, 2022, as fellowships are awarded throughout the admissions cycle, Clare said. (The scholarships are not open to current EWMBA students)
Applicants commuting to campus from outside the Bay Area, or who join the Flex EWMBA cohort, are also welcome to apply to be a SF National Black Fellow.
The fellowship application includes a 250-word essay about how an applicant demonstrated anongoing commitment to increasing opportunity and access to people from racial/ethnic groups who are historically underrepresented in business (specifically Black/African-American, LatinX, and Native/Indigenous communities).
Berkeley Haas has long been an NBMBAA educational partner, and sought to further this relationship with the local chapter, where some Haas alumni are already active.
2021 Finance Fellows, from top left, clockwise: Anojan Palarajah, Mallory Bell, Ali Ware, Alex Rohrbach, Robyn Barrios, Jordan Bell, Alex Sborov, Nonso Nwagha, and Ricky Ghoshal. (Missing from photo: Elias Habbar-Baylac and Sunny Uppal) Photo: Jim Block
As a Black woman, Mallory Bell is on a mission to change the face of venture capital.
“My personal goal is to diversify what the venture capital world looks like,” said Bell, MBA 23, one of 11 students recently named 2021 Finance Fellows at Berkeley Haas. “Money is fuel and if you are in venture capital you can be the one fueling the companies you want to succeed.”
Haas Finance Fellowships are awarded annually to full-time MBA students based on their applications and interviews. Awardees receive a cash grant and priority enrollment for finance electives. They’re also assigned a mentor who provides career advice and support in their chosen field.
In addition to Bell, this year’s Finance Fellows, all first-year MBA students, include Bell, Elias Habbar-Baylac, Alison (Ali) Ware, Anojan Palarajah, Alex Rohrbach, in Entrepreneurial Finance; Jordan Bell, Sheetij (Ricky) Ghoshal, Chinonso Nwagha, and Praneet (Sunny) Uppal, in Investment Banking; Robyn Barrios in Investment Management; and Alexandra Sborov, who received the CJ White Fellowship earlier this year.
This group’s career interests lean toward the global intersection of finance coupled with technology and social impact, said William Rindfuss, executive director of Strategic Programs with the Haas Finance Group.
“Some of our students will be providing strategic advice to high-growth tech or biotech companies from the Bay Area offices of major investment banks or joining a fintech startup or established firm using blockchain technology for financial inclusion,” he said. “Others will be investing venture capital in startups in sectors with social impact.”
The importance of mentoring
A critical part of the fellowship is mentoring. CJ White Fellow Sborov said her mentor, Allan Holt, a senior partner at private equity firm Carlyle, has shared insights about the industry and helped guide her inquiries about investing in different asset classes.
Jordan Bell, who worked as a financial institutions examiner for more than seven years at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco before coming to Haas, was connected to mentor Adam Levine, MBA 20, and a Goldman Sachs investment banking associate.
Levine “has taken a hands-on approach in helping me craft my unique story, prepare my technical analysis, and discuss trends and deals within the technology industry,” Bell said.
“Adam tells it like it is and doesn’t sugarcoat anything, and that is exactly what I was looking for in a mentor to ensure I am the most competitive and well prepared candidate possible,” he said.
Haas students and alumni make vegan burritos to deliver to unhoused people in Oakland and Berkeley. Photo courtesy: Prof. Omri Even-Tov.
In January 2020, Prof. Omri Even-Tov and a team of Berkeley Haas students and alumni spent a Saturday preparing and delivering bagged lunches and hygiene kits to dozens of unhoused people living in Berkeley in Oakland. By day’s end, the 25 volunteers had delivered about 400 meals and 200 hygiene kits to the encampments.
“Our students and alumni walked into the [homeless] encampments with food and walked out with empathy and compassion for a population living amongst us, but seemingly invisible,” Even-Tov said.
Even-Tov is among 12 Haas teams who have received Berkeley Haas Culture Fund Awards over the past two years to work on projects ranging from removing trash from Berkeley streets to providing facilitator training to staff and students who want to lead race-related conversations.
Culture fund awards, which range from $1,000 to $5,000, are given to Haas students, faculty, and staff who come up with new initiatives or activities that promote and strengthen the school’s Defining Leadership Principles (DLPs) and have the potential to make a lasting impact on the school community, curriculum, or student experience.
The awards are administered by a group of faculty and staff–known as Culture Champions–and are made possible by Haas supporters who have donated more than $200,000 to promote the school’s DLPs. This will be the third year in a row in which Haas students, faculty, and staff can apply for grants.
With the help of the culture grant, Even-Tov and Haas volunteers were able to expand their reach and impact. In a span of a year, the group donated roughly 8,000 meals and 2,000 hygiene kits, half of which went to the UC Berkeley Food Pantry to support members of the Cal community.
“Haas volunteers went beyond themselves to help a community that may never be able to reciprocate, they questioned the status quo by refusing to accept the homeless epidemic in the Bay Area, they demonstrated confidence without attitude by showing humility and connecting with unhoused communities, and they embraced being a student always, constantly learning and evolving outside the classroom,” said Even-Tov.
Culture fund projects can have a short-term impact or jump-start an initiative that has potential to make a lasting impact.
“Think of the culture award as seed funding to launch a project,” says Jennifer Wells, program director of the Center for Equity, Gender & Leadership (EGAL), who applied for and received a $5,000 grant to create a database of diverse business cases called the DEI Case Compendium. The compendium includes 215 case studies with diverse protagonists and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) topics.
L-R: EGAL Research Assistant Diana Chavez-Varela, BA 19 (political economy); Associate Director Genevieve Smith, and Program Director Jennifer Wells. Photo: Jim Block
“Our goal was to support professors at Haas and globally to easily identify DEI-related cases that can be used in their classrooms as well as support students who wanted to see themselves represented as business leaders in their curriculum,” Wells said.
Since publishing the compendium online last May, about 1,200 people have viewed the compendium.
Other Culture fund projects that have made a lasting impact include:
Haas Changemakers: Students enrolled in Becoming a Changemaker, an undergraduate and EWMBA leadership course taught by professional faculty member Alex Budak, are given seed funding ranging from $50-$75 to launch a small project, activity, or product that has the potential to create an impact on a local or global scale. Budak says these grants, which are given to support students’ final “Changemaker Projects,” are intended to “break down the barriers of taking action.”
Here@Haas Podcast: An offshoot of the OneHaas podcast, the Here@Haas podcast tells the stories of current students, staff, and faculty. Since going live in April 2020, the podcast has been downloaded 15,000 times in 50 countries. Podcast host Paulina Lee, EWMBA 22, said the podcast has been a boon to the Haas community. “I’ve gotten to know so many people that I don’t think I would’ve met had I not joined the podcast team,” said Lee. “I love hearing other people’s stories and I’m deeply moved when students tell me that our podcast persuaded them to come to Haas.”
Clockwise from top left: Ross Levine, Panos Patatoukas, Nancy Wallace, Dan Mulhern, Guo Xu, and Jenny Herbert Creek.
Six faculty members and five Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) have been honored at 2021 commencements for excellence in teaching.
Students in each degree program choose faculty each year to receive the Cheit Award, named after Dean Emeritus Earl F. Cheit, who made teaching excellence one of his top priorities.
This year’s winners include:
Evening & Weekend MBA program: Assoc. Prof. Panos Patatoukas (evening cohort), who teaches financial information analysis, and Prof. Ross Levine(weekend cohort), who teaches macroeconomics
Undergraduate program: Dan Mulhern, who teaches leadership in the Management of Operations Group as a continuing lecturer and distinguished teaching fellow
PhD program: Asst. Prof. Guo Xu of the Business & Public Policy group
Master of Financial Engineering (MFE): Prof. Nancy Wallace, chair of the real estate group
Graduate student instructors (GSIs): Atusa Sadeghi (EWMBA); Devan Courtois (FTMBA); and Sooji Kim (undergraduate); and Maxine Sauzet and Nick Sanders (MFE)
The award was created by the Academic Senate’s Committee on Teaching to honor faculty, staff, and student instructors who embraced the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and engaged in or supported excellent teaching.
“These instructors and staff used innovative methods and worked beyond their traditional roles to ensure that students remained engaged and supported, and were challenged to do meaningful work under extraordinary circumstances,” wrote the award committee.
Jay Stowsky
Stowsky has served as senior assistant dean for instruction for 14 years, and at Haas for 24 years. He played a critical role in overseeing the transition from live to remote classes.
“Working to match the engagement level of a live, physical classroom has involved hours of brainstorming, planning, workshop training, and investments in a host of new technologies,” wrote Stowsky, who is retiring at the end of the semester. “It has been fascinating, and challenging, to conceptualize, organize and operationalize this goal with the faculty, graduate student instructors, and technology teams at Haas.”
Remote learning innovations at Haas included the installation of four state-of-the-art virtual classrooms, technical upgrades to regular classrooms for virtual teaching, regularly scheduled faculty-student engagement sessions, improvements in production quality of digitized asynchronous content, a remote instruction workshop series for faculty, and tech training.
Peter Goodson
Goodson is a distinguished teaching fellow and continuing lecturer who has taught popular courses on mergers & acquisitions, private equity, and turnarounds to MBA students since 2004. After the pandemic forced all courses online, he invested “hundreds of hours repurposing content and delivery” to transform his courses.
“Our lofty goal was to deliver a ‘value proposition’ that was as good as or better than the in-person model,” he wrote of the experience. “Our team designed an online classroom experience that is optimized for student engagement; altered curricula to showcase students’ company’s pandemic strategies; published COVID MBA cases (including the first at Berkeley Haas); established rigorous and equitable inclusion; and created a feedback system to continuously improve the course.”
The result was courses where students were highly engaged and rated among the very best experiences they’d had with online learning.
Goodson and Stowsky are among 38 individuals and teams selected from 500 nominees for the award. See the full list of honorees.
Henry Chesbrough, faculty director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, was honored with a medal from the Industrial Research Institute (IRI) this month for his standout work in innovation management.
Chesbrough, an adjunct professor who is widely recognized as the father of open innovation, accepted the medal at the IRI’s May 10 annual meeting. The IRI, which represents 200 industrial and service companies interested in effectively managing technological innovation, has awarded the medal since 1946 to top leaders in industrial research.
Chesbrough said his own research has benefited greatly from the IRI and close observation of several of its member companies that have implemented open innovation.
The open innovation concept, which Chesbrough introduced in 2003, argues that companies need to tear down the walls between their R&D organizations and outside companies and innovators. Chesbrough believes that businesses cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license R&D processes and inventions such as patents from other companies.
“As the pace of change quickens across industries, organizations are looking at open innovation not just as a tool for solving unique technology challenges, but for expanding it to include a wider variety of participants and making a significant impact on corporate business models,” Chesbrough said.
The recipient of multiple awards for his research, Chesbrough in 2015 was named to the Thinkers50 global ranking of management pioneers. The Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers, published every two years, has been described by the Financial Times and others as the “Oscars of management thinking.”
“As an American, it’s a great honor to have my work on regulation, much of which has focused on Europe, be recognized by an association of European scholars,” said Vogel.
Berkeley Haas professors Ricardo Perez-Truglia and Anastassia Fedyk have been named to 
