Teaching excellence is a key ingredient of student success at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Instructors go above and beyond with the understanding that their influence may be exactly what a student needs to positively impact the world.

Timothy James McQuade: MBA Distinguished Teaching Award

Timothy James McQuade, Assistant Professor of Finance and Louise and Claude N. Rosenberg Jr. Faculty Scholar, was honored with the 2019 Distinguished Teaching Award for his outstanding instruction in the MBA Program in a ceremony on May 24, 2019.

Students praised McQuade’s knowledge, passion, and humor as characteristics that enabled him to connect with students individually and teach to different learning styles.

Diana Nassar, MBA ’20, a student member of the Selection Committee said McQuade “exemplifies the GSB culture of inclusivity and intellect. He fostered a positive learning environment and made us feel as though he really cared about whether we learned the information.”

“I firmly believe that behind every great teacher are great students,” McQuade said upon accepting his award. “There is a rich, entrepreneurial spirit to this student body that is invigorating to be around,” he stated while noting that interacting with students had spurred his own personal growth.

McQuade has taught introductory Finance since 2015. He conducts research at the intersection of asset pricing and corporate finance, and he is currently examining how prices are impacted by the strategic responses of firms to time-varying uncertainty.

This year, there were 144 nominations for 44 different professors, and members of the student Academic and Selection Committees mentioned that choosing a winner was a challenge due to the volume and the caliber of the nominations.

Five honorable mentions were also noted:

• Rebecca Lester, Assistant Professor of Accounting
• Glenn Kramon, Lecturer in Management
• Keith Hennessey, Lecturer in Economics
• Lisa De Simone, Associate Professor of Accounting
• Robert Siegel, Lecturer in Management

The student members of the Academic Committee and Selection Committee included Valerie Shen, MBA ’19, Kate Wharton, MBA ’19, Tae Yoon, MBA ’19, Diana Nassar, MBA ’20, Chris Satterthwaite, MBA ’20, and Nathan Segal, MBA ’20.

Jesper B. Sørensen: PhD Faculty Distinguished Service Award

PhD students awarded Jesper B. Sørensen, Professor of Organizational Behavior and Robert A. and Elizabeth R. Jeffe Professor, with the 2019 PhD Faculty Distinguished Service Award in a ceremony on May 30, 2019.

Sørensen’s lab, affectionately referred to as the “Jes-Lab” (pronounced Yes Lab) by his students, is a place where students of all disciplines go to receive insights and guidance on research, academia, or life in general.

“He is someone who sees beyond the race, gender, and motherhood status to truly appreciate human beings as they are: humans,” said Solène Delecort, a fifth-year PhD student in organizational behavior.

Jonathan Levin, Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean, described this award as particularly special in a program where the student-to-advisor ratio is 1:1.

Sørensen expressed gratitude for this honor and credited his parents, both of whom are academics, for demonstrating the importance of supporting doctoral students. “Many of those students were part of our lives, even living with us for periods of time,” said Sørensen, “so I came to see one’s responsibility of training and developing the next generation as central to what it meant to be a professor.”

Sørensen’s commitment to student development was a common theme of praise at the ceremony. “The PhD is full of uncertainty and can be scary,” shared a student who nominated Sørensen for the award, “but I feel like in Jesper I have an ally to help me overcome the obstacles that come on an academic journey. I feel truly supported by his advice and mentorship.”

Sørensen specializes in the dynamics of organizational and strategic change and their implications for individuals and their careers. He is currently examining, with a doctoral student, how crowd selection mechanisms affect creativity in organizations. In addition to his research and teaching, Sørensen is the faculty director of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies.

David M. Kreps: MSx Teaching Excellence Award

The MSx program awarded David M. Kreps, Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus, with the Teaching Excellence Award in a ceremony on June 13, 2019.

Kreps, who retired last fall after a 43-year career at Stanford GSB, was selected based on his ability to engage students in the classroom, answer questions on the spot, and clearly break down complex concepts to students of all levels.

Student David Bell, MS ’19, noted that Kreps’ accomplishments in his field did not distance him from his students or lessen the impact he had in the classroom. Although Kreps is “one of the greatest economists of all time, he was never too smart to answer without kindness and without patience,” said Bell, “and he was entirely dedicated to making sure we all understood.”

Upon accepting the award, Kreps addressed his MSx students. “It was a pleasure teaching you because, collectively, you were ready and willing to suspend your disbelief about the value of theory for helping to learn practical lessons. It was a great experience.”

This MSx Teaching Excellence Award marks Kreps’ second GSB teaching accolade. He also received the MBA Distinguished Teaching Award in 1991.

Kreps has impacted generations of students and scholars through his teaching and research on the subjects of dynamic choice behavior, financial markets, game theory, and organization theory. Over the course of his career, he taught competitive analysis, decision analysis, human resource management, microeconomics, operations, and optimization at the MBA level, and choice theory and microeconomics at the doctoral level.

Outside of the classroom, Kreps is known for being a pioneer in his field of economic theory. He has received numerous accolades including the John Bates Clark Medal in 1989, Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2010, the John J. Carty Prize for the Advancement of Science in 2018, and the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics in 2018. In February, the GSB created the David M. Kreps Symposia in his honor.