The Dyson School has been abuzz lately, with yet more high rankings and three exciting new hires.
According to a new rankings system posted by the recently launched undergraduate news site and social network Poets and Quants, Dyson is the second best undergraduate business program in the nation. The site combined the results of the two most closely-watched rankings - U.S. News & World Reports and Bloomberg Businessweek - and added “a new and important wrinkle”: the university’s overall national rank in the annual U.S. News list. They recognized that undergraduates in business programs also take classes elsewhere within the college and university, and that the rankings should reflect their overall academic experience - which is clearly strong at CALS and Cornell!
That experience should get even stronger with the addition of three new faculty members. John Hoddinott (far left) and Jennifer Ifft will join entrepreneurial expert Michael Roach (far right), who started earlier this summer, as professors of food economics and agribusiness.
In a joint appointment with the Division of Nutritional Sciences Hoddinott will be filling the shoes of Per Pinstrup-Andersen, who retired as the H.E. Babcock Professorship of Food & Nutrition Economics and Policy earlier this year. He comes to Cornell from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) - where he served as deputy director in the Poverty, Health and Nutrition Division. Prior to that, he held university appointments in Canada and the United Kingdom, including Oxford. His principal research interest lies in the microeconometric analysis of issues in development economics; the causes of poverty, food insecurity and undernutrition; and the design and evaluation of interventions that would reduce these.
Ifft will become the first Mueller Family Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in Agribusiness and Farm Management. She was formerly a research economist in the Farm Economy Branch of the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (ERS). While at ERS she was also responsible for the U.S. farm business income forecasts and regularly briefed the USDA chief economist and agency leaders on U.S. Farm Financial Forecasts.
Roach is the J. Thomas and Nancy W. Clark Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of university entrepreneurship, scientific labor markets, and firm intellectual property strategies. His primary research agenda examines the career paths of science and engineering doctorates, with a particular emphasis on careers in entrepreneurship and the founding teams of university-based start-ups. He also investigates the changing nature of university research funding and firm patenting activities with implications for science and innovation policy. His experience is personal as well as professional: Roach co-founded a software start-up as a senior in high school and had over eight years of entrepreneurial experience prior to beginning his undergraduate studies. Prior to joining Cornell, he was on the faculty at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
