Five professors were honored with Outstanding Faculty Awards in December for their contributions to the Terry College’s teaching, research, and public service missions. Faculty members were nominated by their peers and represent the college’s dedication to its research, teaching and outreach missions.
Tricia Hackleman, a senior lecturer in the Legal Studies Program, received the 2022 Instructional Excellence Award. Hackleman, who teaches eight course sections a year, specializes in the required undergraduate business course, “The Legal and Regulatory Environment of Business.”
Despite the number of students and course sections she handles every semester, she maintains outstanding student evaluations.
She is known for updating lesson plans each semester to ensure her classes are engaging and reflect current events and the present state of case law. Students say her subject matter expertise and enthusiasm make the required course stand out in their time at Terry.
She participated in the UGA Teaching Academy’s Fellows Program, and in addition to her classroom work, created the Legal Studies Speaker Series to offer students a real-world perspective on their coursework.
Jackie Hammersley, the Harold M. Heckman Chair of Public Accounting, received the 2022 Distinguished Research Award, which honors a faculty member who displays a history of excellence, longevity and impact within the discipline.
Hammersley is a premier expert on auditor judgment and decision-making. Her prodigious body of work on auditor behavior earned her a reputation as one of the top 25 most productive audit researchers since the early 2000s and the sixth most productive since 2016.
She’s been recognized with numerous prestigious research awards and mentored several doctoral students who went on to win dissertation awards. The longevity and effectiveness of her leadership in accounting research helped set the future of auditing research.
Fadel Matta, who serves as Terry Dean’s Advisory Council Distinguished Professor in the Department of Management, received the 2022 Research Excellence Award for his prolific and impactful research program.
As part of the department’s organizational behavior subgroup, Matta has partnered with multiple PhD students and colleagues in his six years at Terry College. In that time, 25 of his 27 journal articles appeared in top-tier management journals, placing him in the upper echelon of young researchers in quality and quantity of work.
The impact of his work was honored by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology with its 2023 Distinguished Early Career Contributions Award.
Kristy McManus, a senior lecturer in the Department of Marketing, received the 2022 Outstanding Faculty Service Award.
McManus, who serves as Terry’s undergraduate program coordinator for marketing, has taught marketing at Terry College since 2015. Her students, who seek out her courses on marketing principles, marketing research, marketing strategy and special topics in marketing, consistently rate her highly. She has won numerous teaching awards, including the college’s Instructional Excellence Award in 2020.
As undergraduate coordinator, she made the success of the major’s undergraduate students the driving force behind her work. She organizes the annual Marketing Student Career Fair, oversees the major’s admissions process and runs the Marketing Student Orientation for these new students throughout the year, heads the Marketing scholarship committees and handles a variety of other daily tasks associated with the management of the marketing students. She is consistently noted by the career services as a faculty member who has made a difference in their professional development.
Ben Whipple, an associate professor at the Tull School of Accounting, received the Teaching Excellence Award.
Whipple joined the Tull School in 2013 and earned a reputation for guiding students through some of the most challenging material in the accounting major: intermediate financial accounting.
He has a reputation for pushing his students to their limits and reminding them how far they have come when they have mastered the material. His course evaluations consistently show students thrive under this instructional philosophy and the rigor and support he provides.