Doctoral

Accomplishments

• Doctoral alum Mary Gilly received the 2011 American Marketing Association William-Qualls-Spratlen Award for excellence in mentoring multicultural doctoral students.
• Doctoral alum Raj Echambadi received the 2011 Outstanding Teacher Award for the University of Illinois Executive MBA program.
• Former doctoral research fellow Adam Rapp was named D. Paul Jones, Jr. and Charlene Jones Compass Bank Endowed Chair in Services Marketing at the University of Alabama.
• Doctoral alum Sonja Prokopec was named LVMH Chaired Professor at ESSEC Business School in Paris.
• Prof. Michael Ahearne and doctoral alum Doug Hughes won the AMA Sales SIG 2011 Excellence in Research Award for their Journal of Marketing paper entitled “Energizing the Reseller’s Sales Force: The Power of Brand Identification.” The Excellence in Research Award is intended to recognize a professional selling and/or sales management article published during the previous year that has made a significant contribution to the sales discipline.
• Doctoral student Zach Hall won a research grant from the University Sales Education Foundation for his proposed research on “Decomposing Customer Need Knowledge: The Role of Customer Need Intuition in the Sales Process.”
• Doctoral alum Alina Sorescu received the Association of Former Students campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award at Texas A&M University.
• Doctoral alum Scot Burton and co-authors won the Best Article Award from Journal of Consumer Affairs for articles published in 2009 and 2010.
• Doctoral student Babak Hayati was named winner of the 2010 ISBM (Institute for the Study of Business Markets) Doctoral Support Award for his research on “Performance Impacts of a Key Account Team’s Social Capital: A Social Network Perspective.”
• Doctoral alum Werner Reinartz chaired the 2010 Marketing Science conference

• Doctoral alum Son Lam received the 2010 Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Marketing Advances. This award recognizes an Assistant Professor who has made significant scholarly contributions to the marketing discipline early in his/her career.
• Doctoral alum Son Lam’s dissertation, “Customer-Brand Identification as a Sustainable Competitive Advantage: A Multinational and Longitudinal Examination,” was runner-up (Honorable Mention) for the American Marketing Association (AMA) 2009 John Howard Award for best doctoral dissertation in the field of marketing. UH doctoral students previously won the Howard Award in 2003 (Alina Sorescu) and 1999 (Werner Reinartz).
• Doctoral alum Keith Richards and former faculty member Eli Jones received the 2010 J. M. Comer Award for Best Contribution to Selling and Sales Management Theory for their Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management article titled “Key Account Management: Adding Elements of Account Fit to an Integrative Theoretical Framework.”
• Doctoral student Willy Bolander received the 2009-10 University of Houston Teaching Excellence Award for graduate teaching assistants. Willy is the third student from our department to receive this campus-wide award in recent years; Keith Richards received the award in 2006 and Doug Hughes received it in 2007.
• Doctoral student Bill Zahn was named winner of the 2009 ISBM (Institute for the Study of Business Markets) Doctoral Support Award for his research on “Exploration and Exploitation: How Competition Motivates through Challenge and Threat.”
• Doctoral alum Doug Hughes received the 2009 Doctoral Dissertation Award from the American Marketing Association Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group for best dissertation in the field of selling and sales management. This is the fourth consecutive year our students have won this award; Babu John Mariadoss won in 2008, Adam Rapp in 2007 and Frank Fu in 2006.
• Doctoral alum Werner Reinartz won the American Marketing Association’s Varadarajan Award for Early Career Contributions in the area of marketing strategy and management. Prof. Reinartz is Professor of Marketing at University of Cologne (Germany), where he is Director of the Department of Retailing and Customer Management.
• Doctoral student Son Lam’s dissertation, “Customer-Brand Identification as a Sustainable Competitive Advantage: A Multinational and Longitudinal Examination,” was named winner of the 2008 Emory Marketing Institute Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Son (Sonny) Lam

Son K. Lam (Sonny), doctoral candidate in Marketing, won first prize in the annual doctoral dissertation proposal competition jointly held by the American Marketing Association (AMA) Relationship Marketing Special Interest Group and the Georgia State University Center for Business and Industrial Marketing. As the winner, Sonny is invited to give a presentation of his proposal “Customer-Brand Identification as a Sustainable Competitive Advantage: A Multinational and Longitudinal Examination” at the 2008 AMA Summer Educator's Conference in San Diego, California, and will receive a grant of $1,000 to support his research. Michael Ahearne, Professor of Marketing and Executive Director of the Sales Excellence Institute at the Bauer College of Business, University of Houston chairs his dissertation. This is the first time a UH doctoral student has won this award.

Doug Hughes

Doug Hughes is one of only two recipients of the University of Houston Graduate Assistant Teaching Award for 2007, winning out over a field of almost 2,000 other eligible competitors across the University. Doug is the third Bauer College teaching award winner in the past three years. On May 1, 2007 Donald Foss, University of Houston Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, will present Hughes with a trophy and a check for $1,000. He holds an MBA from Michigan State University and his undergraduate degree in marketing from University of Tennessee. Prior to his graduate studies, Hughes held director-level positions with The Coca-Cola Company and Miller Brewing Company.

Doug Walker

Doug Walker (Bauer MBA ‘05) won the Best Paper Award in the student competition sponsored by the UH chapter of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). Doug’s paper, “Precision and Selectivity in Database Marketing,” topped submissions from students in all management science areas, including operations, optimization, information systems, decision analysis, finance, and organizations. In addition to his MBA from Bauer College, Walker holds undergraduate degrees in finance and in marketing from Kansas State University. He has experience trading stocks, options, and commodities, and has worked as an investment advisor, broker, and floor trader. On May 4, Walker will receive $500 for his award. Walker will present his paper at the 2007 INFORMS Marketing Science Conference to be held June 28—30 at the Singapore Management University in Southeast Asia.

Frank Fu

Frank Fu's dissertation, “Marketing-Sales Interface for New Products: Analytical and Empirical Essays”, won the 2006 American Marketing Associations Sales SIG Doctoral Student Award for the best dissertation in sales. His dissertation co-chairs were Steven Brown and James D. Hess. Frank is now Assistant Professor of Marketing at University of Misssouri - St. Louis.

Demetra Andrews

Demetra Andrews presented a paper “Missed Opportunities: An Examination of Drivers of Inaction Inertia,” co-authored by Partha Krishnamurthy (Associate Professor at UH) and Anu Sivaraman (Assistant Professor at Delaware and UH Ph.D. class of 2004) at the Behavioral Decision Research in Management Conference in Santa Monica. The BDRM Conference is held biennially and brings together research in the judgment and decision making field with interests in Accounting, Bargaining and Negotiations, Decision Analysis, Games and Economic Behavior, Finance, Management and Marketing.

Keith Richards

Each year the University of Houston gives campus-wide teaching awards to faculty and graduate teaching assistants. There are over a thousand graduate teaching assistants across the university, but only two receive the award as the outstanding graduate teaching assistant at University of Houston.

RICHARDS SELLS A WINNING FORMULA

UH Today, May 3, 2006 - When doctoral student Keith Richards began teaching Introduction to Professional Selling, he had not yet completed his coursework. Despite that irregularity, the Bauer College of Business faculty was sold on the idea of having Richards begin early. Since he began teaching two years ago, Richards has received student evaluations that place him in the top 15 percent of all business school faculty. For these reasons, he received a University of Houston Graduate Assistant Teaching Award.

“In my life there are only a few people who have had a significant impact in my present success, and Keith Richards is one of those people,” one student wrote in an evaluation. “The amount of practical information I learned had me craving a future career in sales.”
The award includes a $1,000 prize and a trophy.
Travis Coggin
Staff writer
Photo by Thomas Shea