Category Archives: Faculty Focus

Nick Thomas

What differentiates us is what we do outside of the classroom.”

Nick Thomas’s transformation from a shy teen in Ellicott City, Md., to an outgoing, globe-trotting hospitality professor at DePaul began with a part-time job as a hotel bellman.

“I really loved the fact that it wasn’t a monotonous job,” Thomas recalls about working as a bellman and, later, front-desk agent at a Hilton hotel outside of Baltimore during high school. “I was very introverted, but when I would get behind the front desk of a hotel, I would get very extroverted. I could talk to people, and I enjoyed that. So, one day, I went to my manager and said, ‘I think I want to do this for my career.’”

Thomas finished high school and headed west to pursue a bachelor’s degree in hotel administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He continued to work in hotel operations while in college and, after becoming a hotel employee trainer, developed a strong interest in hospitality teaching and research. At UNLV he also met his wife, Lisa, who shared his passion for the hospitality industry. The Thomases both completed master’s and PhD degrees in hospitality administration at UNLV, and they taught and held leadership roles at the university’s Singapore campus hospitality program.

In 2011, the couple joined the faculty of DePaul’s School of Hospitality Leadership. Nick directs the school’s J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation Center for Student Development and Engagement, and, since fall 2016, he has served as interim associate director of the school. The Thomases’ teaching continues to have global reach; they co-lead a hospitality study abroad course that visits Hong Kong, Singapore and Macau. This academic year, Nick also taught an online course that paired his DePaul students with hospitality students in China.

The School of Hospitality Leadership’s strength, Thomas says, is its emphasis on real-world learning and innovation. “I feel really confident that what we do inside the classroom is solid, it’s rigorous,” he says. “The students are acquiring knowledge and figuring out how to apply that knowledge. But I think what differentiates us is what we do outside of the classroom—how we do industry job recruitment, the kind of personalized career guidance that the (Marriott) center provides, the mentorships that faculty and industry offer students, and the half-dozen student clubs we have. For a program of our size, I think we have an extremely large footprint in the hospitality industry.”

The best part of his job, Thomas says, is seeing students transform into budding hospitality leaders through the school’s industry partnerships and hands-on learning.

“Getting emails from students saying ‘I got the job offer’ and ‘I got into the management training program that I want,’ that’s one of the most gratifying things in my career.”

By Robin Florzak | Photo by Kathy Hillegonds

Accountancy Professor Mark L. Frigo

Since joining DePaul University more than 30 years ago, Accountancy Professor Mark L. Frigo has taught thousands of students how to create value. Students who take his courses gain a deep understanding of strategy, risk management, accounting and financial analysis, as well as how successful companies achieve sustainable high performance.

“Understanding the pattern of strategic activities of high-performance companies helps our students create value as business professionals, entrepreneurial managers and in managing their careers,” he says. Given his significant contributions to DePaul and its graduates, it’s fitting that the Chicago native has been named the Ezerski Endowed Chair in the School of Accountancy and Management Information Systems. Established by a 2010 gift from Ronald Ezerski (BUS ’68), former vice president of finance at Patterson Co., the endowed professorship recognizes accountancy faculty excellence.

“Being named the Ezerski Chair is a great honor,” Frigo says. “Reflecting on memorable accomplishments at DePaul, there are so many I can recall and most importantly there are many more yet to create in the future.”

Prior to joining DePaul, Frigo led a successful career in corporate financial analysis and management consulting at KPMG. He is the author of seven books and more than 100 articles that have been published in leading journals, including the Harvard Business Review. His research on high-performance companies is featured in “Driven: Business Strategy, Human Actions, and the Creation of Wealth,” a book he co-authored with Joel Litman (BUS ’93) to help leaders better analyze and prioritize value-creating strategies. It is the basis of courses he teaches as a professor and director of DePaul’s Center for Strategy, Execution and Valuation.

Frigo has won numerous teaching awards at DePaul and also was named an Outstanding Educator by the Illinois CPA Society. A fourth-degree black belt in Shotokan karate, Frigo has been practicing and teaching martial arts for five decades and incorporates elements of it into his classroom and executive education presentations.

“I try to instill the wisdom, energy and philosophy from martial arts in my courses to reinforce a learning and creative mindset,” says Frigo. This includes creating an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust between teacher and student in the classroom, he says.

“DePaul is a great university with very motivated and driven students, a talented faculty and very successful and loyal alumni,” he says.

My ‘why’ is to help our students to achieve greater success professionally and personally by changing the way they think in a positive and powerful way.”

By Jaclyn Lansbery

Even though 98 percent of business organizations have formal policies against it, sexual harassment and other forms of aggression are a persistent problem in the workplace.

It’s a problem that Jaclyn Jensen knows well as someone who has been the target of harassment herself and witnessed its demoralizing effect on others in previous workplaces. These experiences influenced Jensen, an associate professor of management at DePaul, to focus her teaching on human resource management and her research on employee mistreatment and misbehavior.

My interest in this topic is fueled by a real desire for others (mainly women) to never be in a situation where they are treated in anything less than a respect­ful manner, and to help victims find proper recourse to prevent mistreat­ment in the future.”

“To that end, my work on incivility and harassment has investigated why employees are mistreated by their coworkers and bosses, how mistreat­ment affects victimized employees’ job attitudes and behaviors, and what bystanders and leaders can do to try and stop mistreatment from occurring.”

Growing up in Cleveland, Jensen initially wanted to attend medical school and become a psychiatrist. Her career focus changed at Ohio State University after she took an organiza­tional psychology course and, as an undergraduate representative on the university’s board of trustees, saw firsthand the complexity of people management in large organizations. “These experiences opened my eyes to the blend of psychology and business in organizations and the need to be really thoughtful about people and human resources at work. It prompted me to pursue grad school in organizational psychology.”

Jensen earned master’s and doctoral degrees in this discipline at Michigan State University and then taught management courses at George Washington University for six years. She joined DePaul’s business faculty in 2012. This past fall, DePaul honored Jensen with its Excellence in Teaching Award.

Jensen says she strives to teach future business leaders that they have both the “opportunity and the responsibility to set the tone for employee conduct in the workplace.

“This goes beyond having a set of policies in an employee handbook, and is more about setting the right kind of examples both in their own behaviors and in the types of people who are hired, promoted and rewarded,” she says. “If the workplace jerk consistently gets ahead while those who treat others kindly do not, that sends a message about the kinds of behaviors that are valued.”

Leaders need to speak up about harassing behavior, Jensen advises, and hold organizations accountable for enforcing policies against it.

“If you witness this type of behavior, own your responsibility as a role model and do what you can to either help the victim, call out the bully or both. This is often easier said than done, as intervening in someone else’s personal conflict can be risky or difficult to do. However, if you’re trying to create a culture where mistreatment isn’t tolerated, interven­ing—even when the behavior seems to be subtle—is an important first step in preventing escalation and sends a message to victims and bullies alike.”

By Robin Florzak 

Hongjun Yan

Hongjun Yan embraces unconven­tional thinking. It’s a mindset that drove him to become an innovative finance professor and scholar, and to join DePaul’s business faculty in July as Driehaus Chair in Behavioral Finance.

Yan’s academic journey began in 1991, when he left his small hometown of Weihui in the Henan province of China to study mathematics at the prestigious Nankai University in Tianjin. China had just resumed stock trading after a 41-year hiatus following the Communist Revolution. “It was a period when the stock market in China started developing from scratch,” Yan recalls. “I soon became fascinated by finance.”

Yan switched his focus to business, earning a master’s in management science, and then entered the London Business School’s finance PhD program. He studied classical finance models, in which investors are assumed to have all the knowledge, analytical power and self-control needed to make rational investing decisions, without the bias of human behavior. But Yan questioned this thinking and found himself drawn to alternative theories of behavioral finance, an emerging academic field that took behavioral biases seriously.

“Growing up in a society that went through dramatic transformation, it is natural for me to be skeptical about mainstream views,” Yan says. “I found it appealing when the research in behavioral finance started challenging the mainstream.” Behavioral finance not only provides a fresh perspective for understanding investor decision-making, he explains, but it also yields new insight into the behavioral influences that affect asset pricing and policymaking.

After obtaining his PhD, Yan taught finance at Yale University for 10 years, where he built an impressive record of research. His scholarly work probes how asset pricing is affected by market imperfections and “bounded rationality,” which are anomalies in investors’ behavior caused by their limited knowledge, information and time. Yan also taught at Rutgers before joining DePaul.

At DePaul, he continues this inquiry while teaching finance classes and leading the Driehaus Center for Behavioral Finance as academic director. The center, which promotes research into the human aspects of financial decision-making, and Yan’s chairmanship are endowed by a 2002 charitable trust gift from Richard H. Driehaus (BUS ’65, MBA ’70, DHL ’02), founder of Driehaus Capital Manage­ment and a proponent of behavioral finance.  Driehaus applauded the choice.

“Professor Yan is an impressive thought leader whose work is advancing the knowledge and application of behavioral finance theories among students, academics and industry professionals,” Driehaus said.

Yan says his goal at DePaul is to nurture an “elite institute in behavioral finance.” He also relishes challenging a new generation of business students to question conventional thinking about finance.

“I always strive to encourage my students to have a healthy dose of skepticism toward what they learn,” he says. “I want them to learn how to use the models, and, more importantly, when and how not to use those models.”

By Robin Florzak

DePaul Finance Professor Rebel Cole

For DePaul Finance Professor Rebel Cole, it’s not unusual to spend one week helping the Banque du Liban in Beirut stabilize the Lebanese financial system and the next week teaching a finance class on another continent. Throughout his career, Cole has blended practice and theory to develop a unique skill set that allows him to combine his love for finance and economics with his passion for teaching and research.

“I take what I’ve learned from my experience working in the government and with banks and translate it into lessons that will help students prepare for their finance careers,” says Cole. “I want my students to know what to expect when they get in the real world.”

A native of rural North Carolina, Cole brings a wealth of international finance experience into the classroom, having worked for the Federal Reserve Board, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He has traveled the world—from Europe to Asia to the Middle East—to assist in the development of stress tests, financial stability indicators and off-site monitoring systems for commercial banks and other financial institutions. He’s also a prolific scholar whose papers have been cited by more than 5,000 researchers.

In his courses, Cole primarily uses real-world case studies that challenge students to take on the role of the decision-maker. He also talks with students about finance-related news stories, encouraging them to discuss how the issues relate to what they are learning and the current state of the economy. These discussions help students think critically, speak with confidence and understand how finance functions in the real world, he says.

“I want my students to know what to expect when they get in the real world.”

“I like to have an interactive classroom where we are discussing real-life examples instead of just having me lecture,” says Cole. “We can solve real problems and delve into what the decision-makers did right and wrong, so that we can learn to avoid making those mistakes in the future.

By Andrew Zamorski

By Jennifer Leopoldt

With the rise of big data, marketers are finding new and better ways to analyze and predict consumer behavior—and Marina Girju is preparing DePaul students to do the same.

“We have a hands-on approach. For every model that I’m introducing, I also have a project where the students have to apply the model to the data set. They put everything in the perspective of the consumer or business so we can understand how the analysis is going to influence all of the parties involved,” says Girju, assistant professor of marketing in the Driehaus College of Business.

The term “big data” refers to the collection of large, complex data gathered through multiple methods. For marketing, data can come from point-of-sale scanners at a store, loyalty cards or online shopping, among other sources.

“The data can be very overwhelming—not only the size, but also the richness,” Girju says. “Most data sets have at least 100 variables that explain consumer behavior, and in my course, it’s usually over 300. You can cut it in a million ways and get a million answers.”

Girju knows about putting data into context. Before joining DePaul in 2012, she worked for TNS, a leader in consumer market research, as a data analyst. Her job for the company’s client Frito-Lay was to study the data generated by thousands of U.S. consumers who recorded details about their snacking habits. Girju and her co-researchers then developed DemoImpact, a forecasting model for predicting snack consumption for hundreds of snacks in dozens of categories.

In her own research and in the classroom, Girju continues to examine the connection between big data and business strategy. She gets her undergraduate and graduate students excited about research and analytics by engaging them in real-world projects. No matter the class, Girju reaches students by combining the theoretical with the practical. “A piece of analysis is important, but it is so much better if it’s actually put in context of trends and challenges in the industry,” she says.

Zafar Iqbal remembers the exact moment when he discovered the depth of his identity.

He was a teenager in the 1980s living in the pensioners’ paradise of Pune, India, when he turned on his television and saw pop icon Michael Jackson “moonwalk” backward across a stage. It was an image that resonated for Iqbal—he wanted to share in the individuality that he saw in American culture.

Iqbal, an associate professor of marketing at DePaul, says seeing such visions of uniqueness and originality spoke volumes to him as he struggled to find his identity in the formal Indian culture, where familial ties often override individual desires. “I grew up Indian,” Iqbal says, “but, in my mind, I’m more American because I always wanted to be an individual.”

Today, Iqbal is helping DePaul students, faculty and alumni discover their identities, both globally and professionally. Because of his cross-cultural experience, Iqbal was tapped by university officials to spearhead DePaul’s educational exchange initiatives with Symbiosis International University in Pune. To date, more than 100 students have traveled to India with Iqbal and Marketing Instructor Luis Larrea to attend classes, visit businesses and nonprofits, meet students and faculty, and learn about Indian culture. Since the partnership with Symbiosis began last year, several DePaul graduates are now working with the likes of Amazon and Groupon on their Indian-focused business initiatives.

When he’s not traversing the globe helping members of the DePaul community live and work in India or teaching business classes, for which he has won multiple teaching awards, Iqbal is conducting essential research for marketing professionals. Currently, he’s working on a large-scale research project to identify and categorize different types of marketing careers.

“There’s not really much (information) out there about what different types of marketing careers exist today,” says Iqbal, noting that the field has expanded rapidly beyond advertising and sales in recent years. According to Iqbal, the job title of marketer is an opaque banner that obscures a host of extremely diverse job types.

Iqbal surveyed 400 DePaul marketing alumni about their careers to develop a career profile for what he has defined as the 14 categories of marketing jobs. “The research will serve as a repository for current students or alumni to understand the different job types that are in marketing and visualize a day in the life of those job types,” Iqbal says.

Decades ago, Iqbal came to the United States seeking his true purpose. Now, he spends his days helping DePaul students and alumni find theirs. Iqbal says, “This is not work, this is a mission.”

I’m so lucky,” says Bin Jiang, talking about his appointment as the business school’s first Driehaus Fellow this academic year. Certainly that luck runs both ways, as Jiang has contributed excellent research and teaching as a management professor at DePaul since 2004. The five-year fellowship, funded by a portion of Richard H. Driehaus’ $30 million donation to the business school, supports the hiring and retention of extraordinary faculty.

“I was drawn to DePaul by the opportunity to work with our depart­ment chair, Scott Young, and other faculty on the business challenges that intrigue me, especially the complexities, both practical and ethical, in managing global supply chains,” Jiang says. “At DePaul, I’m part of a bigger ‘management’ discipline, and that keeps me open to ideas from other areas and colleagues. In many schools, the subsets of management are kept separate, but here we’re an intellectually collaborative group and I really like that.”

In the past 10 years, Jiang has won recognition for his scholarship, including prestigious best-paper awards from the Journal of Operations Management and the Academy of Management. But Jiang’s first love is teaching. “I agree wholeheartedly with DePaul’s philosophy,” he says. “Students are my number one priority.”

In the classroom, Jiang brings a real-world perspective based on 16 years of business experience working in China before coming to the United States. “In operations management, we use a lot of formulas, but a student can’t know what they really mean unless they’re applied practically. I illustrate the principles of supply chain management with case studies based on my own experiences and those of my business friends in China. Because I’m confident in the content, my students connect to the material better.

“Case writing is very time consuming,” Jiang says, “and many schools don’t count it as research. So, teachers are hard-pressed to use cases as a teaching tool. But in law school and medical school, students learn by cases. If I couldn’t provide good cases to my students, I would not be adequately preparing my students for their careers.”

Jiang focuses his work on the role of outsourcing because of the discipline’s central role in modern commerce, he says. “Today’s competition isn’t between companies, but between supply chains. As a result, there’s a lot of risk in these relationships.

“For example, when a company outsources part of its production, is the other company a working horse or a Trojan horse? Will the supplier steal the other’s intellectual property or even its business? This has happened plenty of times,” Jiang cautions. “Given that possibility, management has to ask, Does outsourcing really increase our company’s value? Or is it just a short-term advantage with long-term liabilities? On top of those considerations are ethical ones: Are the working conditions in the foreign company fair and safe?”

Jiang considers the Driehaus Fellowship an affirmation of his work so far and a critical enabler of his work to come. “I plan to use the award to explore an important, but underdeveloped, area—that of post-outsourcing management. I think—I plan—that this research will contribute to the reputation and prestige of the Driehaus College of Business.”

By Margaret Hoag