RENOWNED FACULTY JOINS SBA
Most business schools would be happy to add just one internationally recognized scholar to their faculty, but USD managed to land two of the biggest names in one year.
Thomas Copeland (at right, below) is one of the few people in the world with deep experience and top credentials as both an academic and a practitioner in financial economics. And Jaime Alonso Gomez’s leadership helped bring international recognition to the graduate business school at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico. Last fall, Copeland was named Distinguished Clinical Professor of Financial Economics at USD’s School of Business Administration, while Gomez is now a Distinguished Professor of International Business.
“Our ability to attract such high-caliber professors is a reflection of the great strides we’ve made in the last few years in improving the depth and breadth of our programs,” says the school’s dean, David Pyke.
Copeland, who left UCLA in the ’80s to help lead the corporate finance practice at McKinsey & Co., is happy to be back in the academic world full time.
And with Gomez, USD can tap the skills of someone who helped Tecnológico de Monterrey’s business school gain worldwide recognition in just a few years by internationalizing the curriculum and student body as well as emphasizing ethics and social responsibility.
His new title as distinguished professor formalizes an arrangement Gomez has had with USD for more than a decade, as USD and Tecnológico de Monterrey offer a dual international MBA degree.
Both he and Copeland say USD’s business school is on the way up. In fact, Copeland sees the school becoming one of the nation’s top 10 to 15 business schools in the next decade. “It’s a challenge but it’s viable. We have everything going for us – the right attitude and the right leadership.” Copeland thinks teaching is already one of the school’s strong points but that it needs to make the same strides in research. “As Dean Pyke puts it, excellence in the classroom supports excellence in research and vice versa.” — Liz Harman
