UVA Darden Faculty Members Appointed to Research and Permanent Chairs

The University of Virginia Darden School of Business announced the appointments of faculty members to a research chair, existing permanent chair and the establishment of a new permanent chair.

The appointments, effective immediately, went to the following professors:

John L. Colley Jr. was appointed as the first holder of the John L. Colley Jr. Professorship of Business Administration, a chair without term. This chair was made possible by the generosity of alumni and friends of Darden in recognition of the many contributions to the School by John L. Colley Jr., who has served on the Darden faculty for 47 years. Colley previously held the Almand R. Coleman Professorship of Business Administration for 36 years.

Colley has had a profound influence on scholarship, students, colleagues, the Darden School and its alumni, and the University of Virginia over his long and distinguished career. Colley’s early research in the area of job shop scheduling, which he initially implemented at the Hughes Aircraft Company, has endured as formative and influential in the fields of operations management and decision science. He is author or co-author of 15 books, more than 330 case studies and teaching notes, and over 50 instructional notes.

Colley has been honored for a variety of contributions to the Darden School, the University and his profession, culminating in an unprecedented honor: He was the first Darden faculty member to receive the University of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson Award for service to the University, the University’s highest honor. He also has received the University of Virginia Alumni Association’s Distinguished Professor Award. In addition to the Colley chair, several legacies have been established in his honor, including: The Colley Raven Scholarships, The John L. Colley Jr. Darden Jefferson Fellowship, and the John Colley Award — part of the Mead Endowment Program — which is awarded each year to a Darden faculty member who has contributed to creating an environment of warmth, encouragement and outreach as Colley has done throughout his career. Colley was elected Darden class marshal by seven graduating classes in five different decades and received Darden’s Outstanding Faculty Award, Friend of the Students Award, Frederick S. Morton Award and Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching Innovation. In the broader University of Virginia community, Colley has received the IMP Society’s Distinguished Faculty Award, The Raven Society’s Raven Award and the Z Society’s Distinguished Faculty Award. Colley also received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, College of Engineering, North Carolina State University.

Colley has had a long career of serving on boards of directors of U.S. corporations as well as councils and committees within the University. Colley lives on U.Va.’s historic Lawn, where he continues to hold seminars with Darden students and U.Va. undergraduates. He is a loyal fan of the Cavaliers, having missed very few home football and men’s basketball games since 1967 and twice enjoying the opportunity to serve as guest coach for the football team. His record is 1 — 1.

Luann Lynch was appointed to the Almand R. Coleman Chair, a chair without term. The Almand R. Coleman Professorship in Business Administration honors Almand R. Coleman, a founding faculty member of the School. For 21 years, Mr. Coleman guided the area of management accounting and control with a firm insistence on professional standards of conduct by colleagues and students. This chair reinforces a memory of him that is indelible. The professorship, established by an anonymous donor, has been supplemented by the Class of 1960.

Lynch teaches accounting in the First Year core MBA program and a Second Year elective in management accounting. She is frequently recognized for her outstanding teaching; she was the recipient of the University of Virginia Alumni Board of Trustees Teaching Award in 2000 and elected Faculty Marshal in 2000 and 2013. She was nominated for the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) in 2001, has been recognized as an Outstanding Professor in BusinessWeek‘s Guide to the Best Business Schools and is frequently nominated for the Outstanding Faculty Award at Darden.

Her research interests are primarily in the design and impact of incentive and compensation systems. The focus of her work can be broadly characterized as an exploration of how incentives and compensation systems are structured to encourage the desired behavior by individuals or organizations. In particular, her work has examined incentive issues associated with stock options; compensation in post-merger integration efforts; and the effect of financial reporting, accounting and regulation on incentive compensation. She has published her work in leading accounting and finance journals, including The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Accounting Studies.

From 2006 to 2009, she held the Robert F. Vandell research chair at Darden in recognition of her research contributions. In 2006, she received the Glen McLaughlin Prize for Research in Accounting Ethics for work related to compensation around the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. From 2005 to 2008, she served as Darden’s associate dean for intellectual capital. She currently serves on the Darden School Foundation Board of Trustees as a faculty representative. Prior to joining the faculty at Darden, Lynch was assistant vice president at Roche Biomedical Laboratories Inc., and held positions in finance and accounting at Roche, Northern Telecom (NorTel) and Procter & Gamble.

Tom Steenburgh, who currently holds the John L. Colley Jr. Research Professor of Business Administration, will now assume the Hammaker Research Professorship at the Darden School. The Paul M. Hammaker Professorship of Business Administration honors Paul M. Hammaker, who served on the faculty of the School from 1962 to 1973, after achieving national recognition as president of Montgomery Ward. This chair is a lasting expression of the respect and gratitude accorded him by his students.

Steenburgh joined Darden as an associate professor in the Marketing area of the Darden School in 2012 and was promoted to full professor in 2014. He has distinguished himself in teaching, curriculum development, research and service. Steenburgh is the course head for First Year Marketing and teaches the “Business Marketing and Sales” elective in the MBA curriculum. He is an expert in the area of business-to-business marketing and the faculty lead for the Darden Executive Education course Strategic Sales Management. Steenburgh has extensive publications in leading marketing journals, including Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, Management Science and the Harvard Business Review. Before coming to academics, Steenburgh held several positions in marketing and operations at the Xerox Corporation.