December 2018

This year has seen a change of the guard in our Marketing and Supply Chain Management department. Dr. Michael Smith stepped down as Department Chairperson on June 30, after several years of distinguished service. Thank you, Mike, for all you have done for us! I am privileged—and honored—to take over as the chairperson, and I am especially fortunate to have inherited a wonderful state of affairs. As the year, and our Fall semester, draw to a close, let’s behold the state of our world in Marketing and Supply Chain Management.

The past several years have been a period of tremendous growth in the Fox School, and one manifestation of that has been in our faculty hiring this past year. We are thrilled to welcome eight new, full-time faculty members in MSCM. On the research side, Dr. Xue Bai, who studies data analytics and online social networks and platforms, joins us from UConn; Dr. Marco Qin, who researches market structure and B2B marketing, joins us from the University of Minnesota; Dr. Abhishek Roy, who studies strategic decisions in supply chain management, joins us from the University of Texas at Austin, and Dr. Monica Wadhwa, who researches the drivers of consumer decision making, joins us from INSEAD. And, four of our new full-time faculty were already teaching for us as industry professionals and decided to take the plunge this year as full-time colleagues: Cheri Cutler, who has more than 25 years of experience in public relations and marketing communications; Denise Donaghue, who has worked for more than a decade in insurance marketing and corporate copywriting; Michael Hughes, who has more than 20 years of experience in instructional design and corporate training, and Sheri Lambert, who has more than 25 years of experience in high-level marketing research positions. All of these new colleagues have hit the ground running, and we’re stoked that they have come onboard in our department. In addition, I’d like to welcome Jessica Hallstrom, who joined us as our new department coordinator, and thank Nicole Stilianos, our associate director, for expanding her role in the department and taking on a great deal of administrative oversight.

What else is going on? There’s never a dull moment here, as we redesign our master’s programs in Marketing, plan for a new master’s program in Supply Chain Management, expand our BBA program in Supply Chain (almost 200 majors in SCM to join the almost 1,000 majors in Marketing!), and start up a new PhD program in Operations & Supply Chain Management. All this while we continue to recruit more top-quality research faculty, conduct our 10-year self-study report and prepare to rearrange some of our office space with the opening of our spectacular new Fox School annex, 1810 Liacouras Walk.

In addition to gushing over all of our new colleagues and activities, I want to take a moment to celebrate some highlights from this past year. In April, our AMA undergraduate chapter added to a string of recent successes by placing as a Top 5 overall student chapter at the AMA collegiate conference in New Orleans.  In June, the Fox School and MSCM in particular hosted the annual INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, with over 850 attendees from all over the world. Dr. Xueming Luoserved as General Chair. This conference provided great visibility for our department as well as for Fox. In addition to that, Dr. Subodha Kumarserved as the Conference Chair for the annual Decision Sciences Institute conference, held in November in Chicago, as well as the General Chair for the annual Production and Operations Management Conference, which took place in Houston in May. These honors are symptomatic of the arrival of our department as an elite group.

But we can’t let that go to our heads. I assure you, we are committed as ever to working hard to serve our students and our community in the best way we know how: by continuing to deliver high-quality education and professional skills in our courses and programs, and by pushing the envelope in a variety of exciting research areas, including mobile analytics, consumer behavior, operations and supply chain management, and decision neuroscience. I look to 2019 for more of the same: hard work and high achievement!

Best wishes for the holiday season,

Ed Rosenthal