Lundquist College of Business Mourns Loss of Esteemed Professor
The Lundquist College of Business along with the entire University of Oregon community is mourning the loss of M. Megan Partch, age 58, a longtime and esteemed member of the finance faculty, who died on Wednesday, October 24, after a years long battle with cancer.
"Everyone at the college is deeply saddened by Megan's passing," said Dean James Bean. "Megan enriched our lives with her wisdom and humanity. A world-class scholar, she was always calm, always insightful, and ever a teacher. She had a profound understanding of the world of finance and a passion for her students and scholarship that will be genuinely missed. Our thoughts are with her family."
Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Partch completed her undergraduate work at Carleton College and came to the Lundquist College of Business in 1981 after earning M.B.A. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Wisconsin. She served as head of the Department of Finance from 1997 to 2006, and she later was appointed the John B. Rogers Professor of Banking and Finance.
During her tenure as department head, Partch was largely responsible for advancing the reputation of the college for finance research excellence. She helped pioneer some of the first experiential education opportunities for students, and she was instrumental in attracting and mentoring promising junior finance faculty and Ph.D. students.
Her research in corporate financial policy and corporate governance is among the most cited in the area, and her papers appeared in top-quality journals, including the Journal of Finance and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. In 1997, subscribers to the Journal of Financial Economics voted Partch's article "The Decline of Takeovers and Disciplinary Management Turnover" as the Best Paper in the Area of Corporate Finance published in the journal. Partch also served as an editor and/or reviewer for the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Financial Management Journal of Business Research, and Journal of Financial Research.
In addition to her contributions to finance research, Partch was honored with numerous teaching awards during her twenty-six years at the college, including the James E. Reinmuth M.B.A. Teaching Excellence Award, Business Advisory Council Undergraduate Teaching Award, and P. W. Pipe Outstanding Second-Year M.B.A. Faculty Award. She was also the U. S. Bank Research Scholar from 1994 to 2006, and she was a visiting faculty member at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago, the College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, and the Smurfit Graduate School of Business at University College Dublin.
Beyond her substantial professional accomplishments, Megan was known for her grace, her passion for fine food, and for her strong devotion to her many friends. "Megan and I have been friends and colleagues at Oregon since 1981," said the college's Lindholm Professor of Finance Larry Dann. "Her personal warmth and intellectual insight are a rare combination. We in the finance department will miss her deeply."
Partch is survived by her husband, Wayne Mikkelson, who is the college's Engemann Professor of Finance, and her two sons Evan, 20, and Lewis, 18. The family has requested that any donations in Partch's memory be made to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival or Peacehealth Hospice. A memorial service will be held on November 10 at 1:00 PM in room 182 of the Lillis Business Complex. A reception in the building's atrium will follow.
Investment industry leaders help launch new UO Securities Analysis Center
Program will train students for jobs and fuel Oregon economy.
 |
Ron Sauer talks about how the Securities Analysis Center
will prepare Lundquist College of Business graduates for top
jobs around the country and fuel the growing investment
industry in Oregon. |
Six alumni of the
University of Oregon Lundquist College of Business who went on to great success in the investment industry are now investing their own money in future business graduates.
The six are contributing a total of $2.5 million to help launch the UO's new Securities Analysis Center, which will educate students for careers in the investment industry.
"This new center will be one of only a handful of such programs in the country and will provide a unique focus," said UO President Dave Frohnmayer in a Portland announcement of the donations that will launch the new Oregon M.B.A. specialization in Fall 2008. "The program's graduates will also help fuel the growing investment industry in Oregon."
The six initial donors to the program are Ron Sauer, a 1980 UO graduate in finance, and president of Mazama Capital Management in Portland; James Rippey, a 1953 UO graduate in business administration, and founder and retired president of Columbia Management Group in Portland; Eli Morgan, who attended the UO College of Business until 1958 and is chairman and CEO of 2030 Investors LLC in Portland; Robert Jesenik, a 1980 UO graduate in accounting, and CEO of Aequitas Capital Management in Lake Oswego; Chuck Lillis of Castle Rock, Colo, who earned his doctorate from the UO in 1972, and is co-founder and principal of LoneTree Partners, a private equity investing group, and a managing partner of Castle Pines Capital; and Eric Sorensen, who earned his doctorate from the UO in 1977, and is CEO of PanAgora Asset Management in Boston.
"These donors are making a smart investment in the growth of Oregon's economy and in the futures of hundreds of young people," Frohnmayer said.
"There are three things that will make our program unique," said Lundquist College of Business Dean James Bean. "One, a balance between finance and accounting courses; two, students will learn about a wide variety of investment vehicles, not just stocks and bonds; and three, our program will take advantage of the UO's close ties to Pacific Rim countries by highlighting the investment landscape in Asian countries."
Bean said the only other program in the country that resembles the UO's is the M.B.A. program in applied security analysis at the University of Wisconsin.
Sauer, whose Mazama Capital Management in Portland is the country's largest institutional money manager in small-capitalization growth equities, says the new center will help UO business graduates get top jobs around the country and will provide better trained employees for Oregon companies. "If these students stay in the Northwest, they're more likely to start other money management firms, and this will be good for the Oregon economy," Sauer said.
Rippey, the co-founder and former president of Columbia Management Company and Columbia Trust Company in Portland, where Oregon's first mutual fund was established, said the UO Securities Analysis Center "will further advance Portland's reputation for money management, and I'm pleased to support the college's efforts in this regard because it's the kind of business that is perfect for Oregon. It's non-polluting. It's high income, and you can have clients all over the world."
Bean said that eventually the Securities Analysis Center will serve about 150 students a year, including about 30 graduate students. In addition to new courses, the program will provide experiential learning opportunities such as managing real portfolios and student internships with companies in the industry.
The $2.5 million in gifts announced Thursday will fund start-up costs of the new center, such as hiring a director. Bean said that eventually he hopes to raise enough money to fund a $15 million endowment to support the center.
"It's great for the students. It's great for the University of Oregon, and it's great for the state," said Sauer of the new center. "I'm willing to contribute what I can to make it a quality situation. We anticipate that, once the SAC is launched in the fall of 2008, several other successful Duck investment professionals, as well as outside professionals throughout the world, will become enthusiastic about the center."
The Securities Analysis Center is one of four Centers for Excellence in the Lundquist College of Business. The others are Sports Business, Technology Innovation/Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Supply Chain Management.
Summer Scholars
A cadre of visiting scholars makes for an engaging summer in the finance department.
In the halls and offices of the Lillis Business Complex this summer, you were likely to find a multitude of finance professors and researchers engaged in learned conversations about mutual funds, institutional trading, and other finance issues. These enlightening conversations sparked new insights and were a side benefit of the first Department of Finance Summer Scholars Research Program at University of Oregon's Lundquist College of Business.
The program brought three respected researchers to the college. Paula Tkac, a Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta economist, worked with Associate Professor Diane Del Guercio and Assistant Professor Jon Reuter to study a trend whereby an investor purchasing a mutual fund from one company might actually be investing in a fund operated by another fund family. Eric Kelley from the University of Arizona collaborated with Assistant Professor Roberto Gutierrez to analyze the effects of institutional investors on stock prices as pension funds, mutual funds, and banks become increasingly larger players in the stock market. And Jarrad Harford of the University of Washington partnered with John B. Rogers Professor of Banking and Finance Megan Partch and Engemann Professor of Finance Wayne Mikkelson to investigate whether companies that hold substantial cash reserves performed better than competitors during recent recessions.
"The summer scholars program made it possible for us to work intensively on our projects and make significant progress toward a finished draft," said Del Guercio, extolling the benefits of the program. "We found that we could get so much more done working face-to-face and talking through research design issues."
In addition to accelerating specific research, the program provided networking opportunities for all department faculty members. In fact, as a result of department-wide gatherings with the visiting scholars, several additional finance professors discovered scholarship interests and synergies with the invited researchers. That prompted planned collaborations for future projects--an unforeseen benefit.
"By all accounts, the program was a success, and we are grateful to the Finance Partners (donors supporting excellence in finance research and education) for sponsoring these scholars," summed up Mikkelson, the department head.
Technology Entrepreneurship
A National Science Foundation grant funds entrepreneurship collaboration with industry and Oregon universities.
The Lundquist College of Business is already known for facilitating successful venture launches and helping to uncover the market potential of new innovations. Now, thanks to a $435,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant awarded to the University of Oregon, the college is at the center of a collaborative effort to stimulate Oregon's economy with cutting-edge technologies, start-up companies, and a pipeline of university-trained entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers.
The NSF grant will launch the Oregon Technology Entrepreneurship Consortium (OTEC). OTEC will provide interdisciplinary teams of graduate students in business, law, science, and engineering with opportunities to identify the commercial value in scientific discoveries made at Oregon's public universities, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI). A second component of OTEC will assess market opportunities for technologies developed in Oregon's high-technology sector.
"Connecting Oregon's research institutions with the high-tech industry will lead to a more robust regional economy through technology commercialization," said Dean James C. Bean. "OTEC is a great model to create economic opportunities by integrating graduate education with private- and public-sector product research and development," he added. "Students get an intense experiential educational experience, industry and universities discover the viability of new technologies sooner, and the most promising discoveries make it to market faster."
To accomplish this, OTEC builds on the success of the Technology Entrepreneurship Program (TEP), an initiative spearheaded by the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship. Through TEP, UO students evaluate technologies developed at UO and PNNL for commercialization potential. OTEC expands the collaboration beyond UO and PNNL. As Randy Swangard, managing director of the Lundquist Center, explained, "OTEC is TEP on steroids."
OTEC is also emerging as a flagship initiative for the university because, according to UO Vice President for Research Rich Linton, working in interdisciplinary teams gives students real-world experience and enhances their employment opportunities.
UO was one of eleven out of 206 applicants to receive funding from the NSF's Partnership for Innovation Program in 2007. To leverage the three-year grant, ONAMI awarded OTEC an additional $45,000, bringing total funding to $480,000.
A Class Act
Students tell BusinessWeek that a Lundquist College of Business instructor is one of the best.
Citing his "low-key yet arresting teaching style" and accessibility, BusinessWeek recently profiled Mike Dore, a marketing instructor at the University of Oregon's Lundquist College of Business, as a favorite of students long after they have left his classroom. Dore was selected based on feedback from students responding to the magazine's survey of undergraduate business programs throughout the country.
In its profile, BusinessWeek noted how Dore keeps lessons relevant and interesting. For instance, every year he records a selection of Super Bowl ads, edits them down, collects the press on them, and lectures on why they are important. As one student noted, "I don't think there was a dull moment in his class." The magazine also lauded Dore for answering questions on his home phone after official office hours and making students feel comfortable reaching out to him for advice, even on projects for other courses.
"Mike is a model for the dynamic and collegial education that is a hallmark of the Lundquist College of Business. It is easy to see why BusinessWeek chose to profile him. Students have raved about Mike for years, citing him as one of the most influential people in their lives," noted Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Programs Wendy Mitchell.
For the past nine years, Dore served as the first director of the college's Honors Program, where he fostered a sense of camaraderie among the students and helped graduates obtain excellent jobs and/or admission into M.B.A. programs. During that time, he won numerous teaching awards from the Business Advisory Council, a group of business leaders that advocate for the college and provide advice on issues of importance.
Prior to his tenure at the Lundquist College, Dore was founder and president of Los Angeles-based Gaunt-Dore-Snyder Advertising Agency for seventeen years. Before starting the agency, he worked in marketing management and marketing research at Buckeye International and Carnation Co. (now Nestlé). He also previously taught at the University of Southern California where he was a two-time winner of the Golden Apple Teaching Award.
Dore was one of only nineteen professors and instructors nationally that BusinessWeek profiled for its second annual "Favorite Professors" series. The complete profile of Dore can be read at www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/sep2007/bs20070914_210103.htm?chan=bschools_undergrad+--+favorite+professors+2007_favorite+professors.
Advancing the Olympic Spirit
The head of the United States Olympic Committee praises the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center for its contribution to the Olympic movement.
When Peter Ueberroth speaks, people listen. Ueberroth, the chairman of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) board of directors, shared his unique insights and perspectives with students at the University of Oregon's Lundquist College of Business on Friday, October 26. And in the process, he presented the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center's namesake James H. Warsaw with an Olympic Strength sculpture--a prestigious honor bestowed on select individuals.
Ueberroth was on campus as part of the events leading up to the Olympics Trials in Eugene, June 27-July 6, 2008. The Warsaw Center invited him as the first speaker in a seminar series to promote and advance the excitement and enthusiasm around the Olympic Trials returning to Track Town USA for the first time since 1980.
During his visit, Ueberroth shared with students his perspective on the state of professional sports in the United States, his views on the traits of a good business, and the international significance of the upcoming Beijing Olympics. When presenting the Olympic Strength sculpture, he also lauded the Warsaw Center for the work it has done with the USOC, for its commitment to advancing the Olympic spirit by teaming with Fudan University to offer an executive M.B.A. program to members of the Chinese Olympic Committee, and for the quality of its alumni who have significantly advanced sports business.
"The Warsaw Sports Marketing Center is a world-class program preparing students to lead the increasingly global and complex sports business industry," said Ueberroth. "I'm excited to make the trip to the University of Oregon where amateur athletic history runs deep and passion for sport and sports business continues to put it on the map."
Joining Ueberroth in presenting the sculpture was Rick Burton, former executive director of the Warsaw Center. Burton is now the USOC's chief marketing officer. "It's great to be back at the UO and see the continued growth of the Warsaw Center," said Burton. "Knowing that there are nearly 200 sports business programs in the U.S. now following the lead of the UO program, I'm proud of my association with Jim Warsaw and a talented faculty and staff, great students, and alumni who created this category of business education."
Burton also highlighted the significance of the Olympic Strength sculpture, noting that other recent recipients of the honor include former President George H. W. Bush and International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge.
The Olympic Strength sculpture presented to Jim Warsaw is a miniature replica of the nearly forty-foot statue that greets visitors at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado.