Athens, Ga. – The Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia presented its annual awards for outstanding teaching, research and service to three faculty members. Representing the fields of accounting and management, the three professors were honored at an April 12 reception in Brooks Hall.
Linda S. Bamber, who holds the Tull Chair of Accounting, received the Outstanding Teaching Award. Until earlier this year, she was the only tenure-track faculty member specializing in managerial accounting and had primary responsibility for the Tull School’s undergraduate and M.B.A. curricula on the topic.
Bamber has the rare distinction of having previously been honored for her excellence as a teacher at all three instructional levels: undergraduate, M.B.A. and Ph.D. In 2004, she received the Percy B. Yeargen Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award from the Beta Alpha Psi undergraduate honorary society. She was chosen for the Hugh Nourse M.B.A. Outstanding Teacher Award by the M.B.A. Class of 2005. And she is the only accounting professor to have chaired the dissertations of two American Accounting Association Competitive Manuscript Award winners, which is the association’s highest award for sole-authored research.
Tull School of Accounting Director Ben Ayers noted that Bamber has been an integral part of the faculty. These faculty members are known for teaching rigorous courses that challenge students to elevate their class preparation to a level commensurate with a professional program. In spite of the added rigor, Bamber’s student evaluations remain outstanding.
“I think a hallmark of an excellent teacher is that her students impose upon themselves a duty to meet, even exceed, her expectations,” stated one of her former students. “However, this duty is rooted not in fear, but in respect. Dr. Bamber has certainly earned such respect; it is a testament to her excellence in teaching.”
Daniel C. Feldman, who holds the Synovus Chair of Servant Leadership, received the Outstanding Research Award. Considered a leading authority on career issues, Feldman has investigated virtually every aspect of career development, ranging from early career indecision to adjustment to retirement.
“Daniel is widely known for his counterintuitive approach and for the novelty of his ideas,” said Department Head Allen Amason, in nominating Feldman. “For example, while most scholars in the field were examining how employees were preparing for high-growth careers in the 1980s, Daniel was one of the first to focus on the waves of job loss and unemployment that were soon to break. And when most organizational behavior researchers were examining rational models of why young adults choose one job over another, Daniel was doing innovative research on why young adults were having trouble starting their careers at all.”
Feldman is among the top five in sole-authored publications in both the Academy of Management Review and the Journal of Management over the past 20 years. In less than four years on the Terry College faculty, he has been remarkably productive as a researcher — with more than 10 articles published in major journals — even as he was serving during most of this same time as editor of the Journal of Management, associate dean for research and interim head of the Management Department. He has published six books and well over 100 articles during his career. Moreover, he has had more than 3,000 lifetime citations to his work, with 10 of his articles having more than 100 citations apiece.
He has won the Best Paper Award in the Careers Division of the Academy of Management twice in the past 10 years, once for his work on early retirement incentives and again for his research on early career indecision.
Mark C. Dawkins, an associate professor of accounting and Terry’s director of diversity relations, received the Outstanding Service Award. As a certified public accountant and certified management accountant, he has been actively involved with the Georgia Society of CPAs (GSCPA) since 1997.
“As a professional school, it is important for the Tull School faculty to have strong ties with the accounting firms, corporations and other organizations that hire our graduates, contribute financially, participate in classes and seminars and support the school in other ways,” said Ayers, in nominating Dawkins. “Mark has been a leader in this effort in every dimension.”
Dawkins has served as coordinator of the GSCPA High School Residency Program at UGA since its inception in 1999. The summer program, which introduces underrepresented high school students to careers in accounting and business, has been expanded to the campus of Georgia Southern University and may be expanded to a third Georgia college campus next year. For his efforts, he was named GSCPA’s Accounting Educator of the Year for 2006.
Dawkins also is very involved with the KPMG Ph.D. Project, the national initiative to increase the number of faculty of color in schools of business. Each fall, he attends the annual Ph.D. Project Conference in Chicago and recruits minority Ph.D. candidates on behalf of Terry College. Dawkins also has served as faculty advisor to the Graduate Minority Business Association and the Terry College chapter of the National Association of Black Accountants for over a decade.
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. Each recipient received a $1,000 cash prize.
