Johnson School Professors Rao and Zhang named Whitcomb Faculty Fellows

May 10, Ithaca, New York
Vithala Rao, the Deane W. Mallott Professor of Management and Professor of Marketing and Qualitative Methods, and Xiaoyan Zhang, Assistant Professor of Finance, were appointed the Clifford H. Whitcomb Faculty Fellows for a one-year term effective November 1, 2005. The fellowships were established by Clifford Whitcomb '43, MBA '48, an active alumnus and longtime supporter of the Johnson School and Cornell. The income from the endowment of the Fellowships is used to support the work of the recipients.

Professor Rao's interests lie in the development and application of analytical models for marketing research and marketing strategy. His publications have dealt with such topics as dynamic pricing; product positioning and product design; application of multidimensional scaling and conjoint models for the analysis of consumer preferences and perceptions; market structure analysis; brand equity; acquisition; and evaluation of subsets of multi-attributed items. He has consulted for various industrial firms and is currently engaged in research on issues associated with preannouncement strategies, price bundling, choices of bundles, resource allocation, and competitive reactions. Since joining the Johnson School in 1970, he has published nearly 100 articles and 5 books; most recently (with Joel Steckel) The New Science of Marketing (1995) and Analysis for Strategic Marketing (1998). He received the Johnson School's Exceptional Research Award in 2000-01.

Professor Zhang's research interests include international finance, empirical asset pricing, and applied econometrics; her teaching interests are international finance, investments and derivatives. She published in Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance and Journal of International Money and Finance. She also received the Lehman Brothers Fellowship for Research Excellence in Finance for 2001.

The Johnson School at Cornell University, founded in 1946, is Cornell's graduate school of management. The Johnson School combines leading edge intellectual capital with "real time, real world" business practice and is among the top business schools in the world. The school is distinguished by a diverse, multinational community working closely within a small, interactive and intensely collaborative environment. The Johnson School offers a wide variety of opportunities for experiential learning, such as immersion curricula and student-run venture capital and mutual funds. Programs include MBA and doctoral degrees, a twelve-month MBA option for students with advanced degrees in science or engineering, an executive MBA and a variety of customized executive education programs. The Johnson School is located at the center of Cornell University-the largest of the Ivy League schools and one of the world's top research institutions. For more information about the Johnson School visit www.johnson.cornell.edu.

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Randall Sawyer
Public Relations Officer
607 255-8006
rs348@cornell.edu