The business education news outlet featured Love School of Business professors Haya Ajjan and Adam Aiken in its 2020 list of the country’s top 50 undergraduate business professors.
Haya Ajjan, Sheldon and Christine Gordon Professor in Entrepreneurship and associate professor of management information systems, and Adam Aiken, associate professor of finance, have both been named to Poets&Quants’ “Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professors of 2020” list.
The business education news outlet’s editorial staff evaluated more than 100 nominated professors in two categories: research and teaching. For research, they considered a professor’s volume of Google Scholar citations, media attention from research, and research and writing awards. For teaching, the group looked at nominations, teaching awards and internet reviews.
This year is the third time Poets&Quants (P&Q) has published a Best Undergraduate Business School Professors list. The 2018 list included Elon’s Professor of Accounting Susan Anderson.
In Ajjan’s profile, P&Q editor Nathan Allen wrote: “At Elon University’s Love School of Business, Haya Ajjan is the go-to professor for all things data and business analytics. Now at the school for a decade, Ajjan is the founder and director of the Center for Organizational Analytics. She teaches courses like Data Mining for Managerial Decision Making, R-Programming, and the App Economy. Ajjan also played a major role in developing the curriculum for Love’s M.S. in Management concentration in Organizational Analytics.
“Teaching business-related topics is in Ajjan’s blood. Her father was a professor of economics at the University of Damascus in Syria and remembers hearing stories about his teaching when she was just seven years old. ‘I always looked up to him and was inspired by his relationship with his students,’ Ajjan says of her father. ‘I often read the ‘Thank you’ notes his students sent him, and that gave me a great sense of pride in his work.’”
Read Ajjan’s full P&Q profile.
In Aiken’s profile, Allen wrote: “Adam Aiken is relatively new to teaching at a business school, joining Elon University’s Love School of Business faculty in 2015, but he’s not new to universities. Or finance,” Allen wrote. “Aiken says he realized he might want to be a business school professor ‘back in the early 2000s when I was working at a university endowment and realized I wanted to spend time figuring out what might actually be true in finance. Still working on that.’
“Since becoming a business school professor, Aiken has been a publishing machine, earning hundreds of Google Scholar citations. Aiken’s research focuses on the performance of hedge funds as well as individual investors. If he wasn’t a business school professor, Aiken says he’d still be ‘sitting in front of a computer somewhere doing something finance related.’”