Five Terry professors named to endowed faculty chairs

The Terry College Business Learning Center in the Fall.
  • Christopher Cornwell, a professor and head of the Economics Department, was named to the Simon S. Selig Jr. Chair for Economic Growth. His scholarship falls into three areas – applied econometrics, labor economics and economics of education – and he has made significant contributions to each. Cornwell joined the department in 1988 and has served as its head since 2008. He also holds an adjunct appointment in UGA’s Department of Public Administration and Policy and is a senior fellow in the university’s Institute of Higher Education.
  • Stuart Gillan, at Terry since 2011, was named the Mercer W. Hull Professor in Finance. He has written and published extensively on corporate finance and corporate governance. He has served as co-editor of the Journal of Corporate Finance, associate editor at the Review of Financial Studies and is on the editorial boards of Accounting and Finance and the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance. His experience includes time as associate chief economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission and a research economist at TIAA-CREF. He has taught extensively in Terry’s EMBA, MBA and undergraduate programs and received the Hugh O. Nourse Outstanding MBA Teacher Award in 2012.
  • Scott Graffin, a professor in the Management Department since 2006, was named the Synovus Chair in Servant Leadership. His research focuses on how CEOs, top management teams and corporate boards shape organizational actions. He recently served as an associate editor for the Academy of Management Journal, is a research fellow for the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation and was elected to the executive committee of the Strategic Management Society. He received Terry’s 2017 Research Excellence Award, given to tenure-track faculty for superior research published in the past five years.
  • William Lastrapes, a member of the economics faculty since 1990, was named the Bernard B. and Eugenia A. Ramsey Chair of Private Enterprise. An expert in monetary economics and time series econometrics, he is editor of the Journal of Macroeconomics and served as head of the Economics Department from 2002 to 2008. He has twice been awarded the department’s Kamerschen-Hampton Outstanding Research Award.
  • Tao Shu, who joined the Finance Department in 2007, was named the Bradford McFadden Professor of Personal Financial Management. He is an expert in empirical asset pricing, institutional and individual investors, behavioral finance, corporate finance and financial accounting. He has received funding support from the Terry-Sanford Research Award four times and was given the Hugh O. Nourse Outstanding MBA Teacher Award in 2013.