News

The Haas School of Business is hiring nine new faculty members from around the country for the fall semester.

The school announced Friday that two new professors and seven assistant professors have been hired for the fall 2012 semester.

Professors Ross Levine and Toby Stuart will join the Haas faculty, along with current assistant professors Brett Green and Alexander Nezlobin. Andreea Gorbatai, Yuichiro Kamada, Reed Walker, Jose Guajardo and Sameer Srivastava will become assistant professors upon the formal acceptance of their dissertations.

According to Andrew Rose, associate dean for academic affairs for Haas, the school hired these new faculty members mainly in order to fill vacant positions.  In recent years, many professors, including professor Robert Helsley, have retired or moved on to other positions. The school is also still growing, so it is necessary to increase faculty to adjust to increasing class size, Rose said. Beyond necessity, the school is always seeking to improve the quality of it’s faculty.

“The quality of teaching is extremely important to Haas,” Rose said in an email. “We were fortunate to be able to hire at the very top of the market.”

In 2007, prominent San Francisco real estate developer Gerson Bakar donated $25 million to Haas, which has since allowed the school to expand its permanent faculty.

“We continue to hire at the very top of the faculty market. It is a part of what’s making us stronger and stronger,” said Dean Richard Lyons in the press release. “Great faculty attracts great students and great staff.”

The business school has drawn the new professors and assistant professors from prestigious universities around the country. The new faculty members expressed enthusiasm about the exciting and rapid growth of the relatively young school, and many said they appreciate the energetic atmosphere at Haas and in Berkeley in general.

One aspect of Haas that the incoming faculty members appreciate is the quality of the students and the faculty.

“Haas has great students and faculty, and it is integrated into a great university,” said Levine, who will be coming from Brown University.

Srivastava, who recently gained his Ph.D. in organizational behavior and sociology from Harvard University, will begin at Haas in July of this year as a new assistant professor. Srivastava said that he was impressed by the quality of the student population, as well as the quality of the dialogue in the classrooms, when he visited Haas.

“Haas, and the finance department in particular, has assembled a group of talented junior faculty who are at the very top of the field in both their research and teaching,” said Green, formerly an assistant professor at Northwestern University, who has been a visiting professor at Haas since 2011. “It is really an ideal environment for a young professor to pursue and collaborate on research.”

Some of the new faculty members look forward to the fact that Haas focuses on combining research and teaching, and more generally, interdisciplinary integration. Srivastava said that he is most excited about being able to continue his research as well as teach in the spring.

One element that excites the new faculty members about Haas is the fact that it is in the Bay Area.

“The Bay Area is a great hub for information and entrepreneurship, ” Srivastava said.

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