HBS Professors Win Wyss Award for Excellence in Mentoring Doctoral Students
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BOSTON—Two Harvard Business School (HBS) faculty members, Professor Shane Greenstein and Assistant Professor Rory McDonald, will receive the tenth annual Wyss Award for Excellence in Mentoring for their work with students in the Doctoral Programs at the Doctoral Program End of the Year Party, to be held on Thursday, May 11. Additionally, Professor Max Bazerman and Assistant Professor Lakshmi Ramarajan have been selected as the two runners-up based on the outstanding nominations they received. The winners and runners-up were selected from a pool of 50 faculty nominees (24 junior and 26 senior). In all, 73 nominations from students spanning all of the HBS doctoral programs were received for this award. In keeping with tradition, the main advisors of the selection committee chairs and award winners of the past five years were excluded from consideration. 
Shane GreensteinGreenstein is the Martin Marshall Professor of Business Administration and co-chair of the HBS Digital Initiative. He teaches in the Technology and Operations Management Unit and is also co-director of the program on the economics of digitization at The National Bureau of Economic Research. "Shane was an incredible influence during the third year of my program," one student wrote of Greenstein. "It was while taking his class (Empirical Studies of Innovation and Digitization) that I really learned how I should approach research topics, how to ask the important questions, and which questions are the important questions." "I love how Shane gives realistic, directly applicable, and honest feedback throughout all our interactions," another student offered. "And I always know he has what's best for me at heart. For the job market he is helping me navigate the market, helping me shape my job market paper and other dissertation chapters to make them appealing and to best prepare me. He is tremendously supportive to all his students. He is able to meet as often as you need help from him, which is so kind and generous of him." 
Rory McDonaldMcDonald is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration also in the Technology and Operations Management Unit. He teaches Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise (BSSE) in the MBA elective curriculum and previously taught the Technology and Operations Management course in the MBA required curriculum. In 2016, he was named one of the world’s top 40 business school professors under 40 by Poets and Quants. "Whenever I feel frustrated or unclear on a project, Rory always provides me with encouragement that helps center me and keep me focused on the potential long-term value of the things I am doing," one student said of McDonald. "He is an energizing force that helps me to sustain my creativity and motivation. I cannot imagine navigating the doctoral program without someone like him to turn to for candid feedback and inspiration." "Rory has played a central role in helping me see the good I can accomplish in the world through a career in academia," another student noted. "Part of that, as he has taught me, is selecting a research topic that is relevant to both practitioners and academics. But it is also viewing your work as a professor as a calling to help the people around you become better people. Rory lives this advice every day through his interactions with students and colleagues and is making a big difference in the world through them." Bazerman is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and the Co-Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on decision making, negotiation, and ethics, and he is the author, co-author, or co-editor of twenty books, as well as a member of the international advisory board of the Negotiation Journal and a previous Wyss Award winner. Ramarajan is an Assistant Professor in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. Her research examines the management and consequences of identities in organizations, and how people can work fruitfully across social divides, with a particular emphasis on identities and group boundaries. The Wyss Awards are named in honor of Hansjoerg Wyss (MBA 1965) who, in 2004, established the Hansjoerg Wyss Endowment for Doctoral Education. The Wyss Endowment supports a broad range of efforts to strengthen the HBS Doctoral Programs, including fellowships and stipends for doctoral students, increased support for field research, new doctoral course development, teaching skills training, and the renovation of doctoral facilities on campus. |
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