Athens, Ga. – The Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia presented its annual awards for outstanding teaching and research at a recent faculty meeting.
Representing the fields of marketing and management, two professors were honored at a faculty meeting. Margaret A. Emmelhainz, a lecturer and undergraduate academic coordinator in the marketing department, received the 2008 Outstanding Teaching Award. Robert J. Vandenberg, a professor of management, received the Outstanding Research Award.
Emmelhainz has been the recipient of six teaching awards in the past five years, including the Marketing Management Association’s Hormel Meritorious Teaching Award and both the Emil S. Troelston Teacher of the Year Award and the Marketing Teacher of the Year from Alpha Kappa Psi business fraternity.
“She has been blessed with a special gift-a way to teach, share, and communicate with her students that few professors possess,” said former student Jeroen Sterling. “The tools and knowledge that I gained in her courses are things that I will take with me for the rest of my life and apply throughout my career-undoubtedly making a difference in the questions that I ask, the decisions that I make and my overall success as a business professional.”
Emmelhainz teaches undergraduate courses in principles of marketing and services marketing and an M.B.A. course in supply chain management for the college’s customized M.B.A. program for IBM. As the undergraduate academic coordinator for the department, Emmelhainz is the first faculty contact with students who wish to enter the major or are seeking career advice. In this capacity, she is also a resource on undergraduate teaching methods, issues and policies to other faculty members.
“Dr. Emmelhainz is an outstanding educator,” said Interim Marketing Department Head Richard Fox. “She has been more than willing to take leadership roles in classroom integration, curriculum development and course development. She combines the skills of an excellent instructor, along with the organizational skills needed to administer and manage the program.”
In addition to her teaching responsibilities, Emmelhainz is a mentor in the Leonard Leadership Scholars Program and manages the department’s marketing executive advisory board, a group she and faculty colleague Kevin Ellis were instrumental in establishing. It consists of 15 marketing professionals and executives whose companies either currently employ or plan to employ Terry marketing majors.
Emmelhainz is the current faculty director for the Advanced School of Marketing Research, a one-week class offered through the American Marketing Association. The well-regarded executive education course has been so successful that the AMA decided to award the introductory course on marketing research to the Terry College beginning in 2009.
Before she joined the Terry faculty in 2000, Emmelhainz was the First Coast Systems Professor of Marketing at the University of North Florida. She earned her Ph.D. in marketing and logistics from The Ohio State University.
Vandenberg is considered one of the top methodologists in the field of management today, Vandenberg specializes in longitudinal data analysis, latent class structures and measurement equivalence.
He co-authored, with Charles Lance, a landmark study in 2000 that received the 2005 Robert McDonald Advancement of Research Methodology Award from the Research Methods Division of the Academy of Management as the best publication on methodology from the previous five years. He also is the editor-in-chief for the journal Organizational Research Methods.
In addition to teaching courses on research methodology, Vandenberg has led workshops on the subject in Europe and Asia. As a Distinguished Research Methodologist for the Center for the Advancement of Research Methods and Analysis, his workshops are attended by faculty and Ph.D. students from across the United States and Web cast to 50 different universities around the world.
“Bob is truly deserving of this recognition for a long and distinguished research career,” said Management Department Head Allen Amason, who also noted Vandenberg’s success with mentoring doctoral students as they conduct research at peer institutions. “As just one example, his most recent Ph.D. student, Thomas Ng, joined the faculty of the University of Hong Kong, the oldest business school in the region. Thomas has already won a national award from the Careers Division of the Academy of Management for his work on job mobility, and that paper was published in Personnel Psychology this year. It is important to note that Bob did not co-author these pieces. Rather, he has trained Thomas to be an excellent and independent researcher.”
Of Vandenberg’s scholarly articles, more than 80 percent have been published in what are regarded as the highest quality journals in his field, including the Journal of Management, the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. One of his recent papers, co-authored with doctoral student Laura Stanley, won the 2007 Best Paper Award in Organizational Behavior from the Southern Management Association.
Vandenberg also has been a very successful at generating external grant money. Since 1999, he has been a co-principal investigator on three grants and was recently part of a three-year grant for $1.7 million from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.
The Terry College’s Outstanding Faculty Award winners were chosen by a committee of their peers based on nominations from the college’s seven academic departments. Awards are presented for outstanding teaching and research. Each recipient received a $1,000 cash prize.