2021 Faculty Awards and Accolades

A few notable highlights, recognitions and honors for professors and staff within the Orfalea College of Business in 2021.

Orfalea College of Business professor of organizational behavior and development Rami Shani was selected to receive the 2020 Organizational Development Network Award for Communicating Organizational Development Knowledge. This award recognizes practitioners who bring new, clarified or expanded knowledge to the field of organizational development, contribute conceptually to the field and play a leadership role in sharing knowledge that has significantly influenced the field. Shani was also nominated for the Pasmore-Woodman Award for his work in organization research, scholarly writing and service to the fields of action research and organization development. The award recognizes not only exemplary research, but also the researcher’s work over a sustained period of time.

Associate professor Patricia Dahm’s article, “Identity Affirmation as Threat? Time-bending Sensemaking and the Career and Family Identity Patterns of Early Achievers,” was selected as a nominee for the 2020 Rosabeth Moss Kanter International Award for Research Excellence in Work and Family. Her work was recognized as one of 15 nominees, drawn from more than 2,500 articles published in 2019 from around the world.

Professor Steve Hamilton and his coauthors — professors Olivier Bonroy, Alexis Garapin and Diogo M. Souza Monteiro — won the Quality of Research Discovery Award from the European Association of Agricultural Economists for their 2019 paper “Free-Riding on Product Quality in Cooperatives: Lessons from an Experiment,” which was published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. The Quality of Research Discovery Award is granted each year for scholarship that makes a significant contribution to the field of knowledge in agricultural economics.

Orfalea College of Business professors Sanjiv Jaggia, Leida Chen and Kevin Lertwachara’s textbook, Business Analytics: Communicating with Numbers, won Product of the Year at the McGraw-Hill national awards program at the end of May.

Orfalea College of Business professors Tim Ridout and Jack Wroldsen received the 2020 de Werd Faculty Award for Impact on Student Success. The de Werd Award was established in 2018 by Cal Poly alumnus Jourdi de Werd (’80) to reward faculty members who repeatedly go above and beyond to help their students thrive. All recipients are nominated by the Orfalea College of Business student ambassadors, students who have witnessed first-hand the efforts of these faculty members to engage students in the classroom.

Assistant professor T.J. Weber was the recipient of the Hood Professorship in Marketing. The award, founded in 2005 by a family of Cal Poly alumni, is given each year to marketing faculty who push boundaries to evolve student learning opportunities and support the objectives of the college and university.

Professor Allison Ellis and her colleagues were shortlisted as nominees for the Scholarly Impact Award by the Journal of Management, which is the top academic publication in the business and management fields. Each year, the journal’s editors give the Scholarly Impact Award to a paper it published five years prior, basing their decision in part on “the extent to which the article changed our way of thinking, how the article added to what we know and the reach the article has had in terms of affecting ongoing work in the field.” Ellis and her coauthors received the nomination for this prestigious award for their 2015 paper titled “Navigating Uncharted Waters: Newcomer Socialization Through the Lens of Stress Theory.”

The Orfalea College of Business faculty and staff awards are given at the end of each academic year in several categories. The Distinguished Faculty of the Year and Outstanding Faculty awards are determined by student feedback via a survey. The Emeritus Faculty Award is determined through nominations by each department’s area, with the dean’s team providing deliberations and a final decision. The Staff Member of the Year Award is based on a college-wide survey. Please find the results below. A warm congratulations to all the professors within the Orfalea College of Business, who are making an impact in the classroom, nationally and internationally in their fields.

Distinguished Faculty of the Year Award

Pratish Patel, Associate Professor of Finance

Emeritus Faculty Award

Katya Vasilaky, Assistant Professor of Economics

Outstanding Undergraduate Faculty Awards

Accounting: Tad Miller
Economics: Jackie Doremus
Finance and Real Estate: Pratish Patel
Industrial Technology: Ahmed Deif
Packaging: Joongmin Shin and Koushik Saha
Entrepreneurship: Jose Huitron
Management: Hong Hoang
Information Systems: Jim Burleson and Leida Chen
Marketing: John Marinovich

Outstanding Graduate Faculty Awards

Masters of Business Administration: Bruce Greenbaum
Masters of Business Analytics: Sanjiv Jaggia
Masters of Quantitative Economics: Carlos Flores
Masters of Accounting: SiSi Pouraghabagher
Masters of Taxation: David Chamberlain
Masters of Packaging Value Chain: Adam Armstrong

Outstanding Staff Award

The Orfalea College of Business Information Technology Team: Joe Emenaker, director of computing resources and labs; Teresa Cameron, instructional designer; Frank Gonzales, academic technology and media communications supervisor