Alumni Association Selects Distinguished Faculty, Baum Award Recipients

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Each year, the Arkansas Alumni Association and the University of Arkansas proudly recognize the exemplary achievements of faculty through the Faculty Distinguished Achievement Awards and the Charles and Nadine Baum Faculty Teaching Award. This year’s recipients, Gary Ritter, Viswanath Venkatesh and Molly Rapert will be honored during the Alumni Awards Celebration during the 2012 Homecoming weekend.

Named the recipient for service, Ritter is a professor of education and public policy and holder of the Endowed Chair in Education Policy in the department of education reform in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas. He is also the director and founder of the Office for Education Policy at the university. The office serves as a resource that aids state legislators, school board members and other policymakers in thoughtful decision-making concerning K-12 education in the state of Arkansas. Ritter has been a faculty member at the U of A since 2000.

Currently, his primary area of interest is the development of alternative strategies for teacher compensation in public schools. His research interests also include program evaluation, school finance, standards-based and accountability-based school reform, and racial segregation in schools. Ritter teaches courses in education policy, assessment of educational outcomes, program evaluation and research methods to graduate students. His work has been published in various publications.

Ritter graduated from John Carroll University with a bachelor’s degree in finance in 1990. After working as a Jesuit Volunteer for Sacred Heart School in Camden, N.J., he attended the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, where he earned a master’s degree in social policy. After returning to the United States, Ritter earned a master’s degree in public policy from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1996 and a doctorate in education policy in 2000 from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Venkatesh, a distinguished professor and the first holder of the George and Boyce Billingsley Chair in Information Systems in the Sam M. Walton College of Business, is receiving the award for research. Venkatesh, who completed his doctorate at the University of Minnesota in 1997, joined the University of Arkansas faculty in June 2004. He previously taught at the University of Maryland. In addition to presenting his work at universities across the world, he has held many visiting appointments at Australian National University, Helsinki School of Economics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Indian School of Business, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Hawaii. His research focuses on understanding the diffusion of technologies in organizations and society.

For more than a decade, he has worked with several companies and government agencies in different capacities ranging from a systems engineer to a special consultant to the vice president, and has rigorously studied real world phenomena. He serves on an expert panel at the United Nations that focuses on the advancement of women. The sponsorship of his research has been about $10 million, including funding from government agencies. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in leading journals about information systems, organizational behavior, psychology, marketing and operations management. His articles have been cited more than 12,200 times and 4,500 times per Google Scholar and Web of Science respectively. Some of his papers are among the most cited papers published in the respective journals of his field. He has taught a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses.

Student evaluations have rated him to be among the best instructors at the various institutions, and he has received teaching awards at the school and university levels. He has performed extensive administration and service. At the U of A, from 2004 to 2009, he was the director of the information systems doctoral program. At Maryland, he was the director of the Master of Business Administration Consulting Program and led undergraduate curriculum revision efforts. In 2009, he launched an information systems research rankings web site that has received many accolades from the academic community. He has served on several committees at the university, school and department levels.

Rapert (B.S.B.A. 1985, M.B.A. 1987), associate professor in the department of marketing in the Sam M. Walton College of Business, is receiving the Charles and Nadine Baum Faculty Teaching Award. She is also the director of the Walton College of Business Center for Teaching Effectiveness. An annual member of the Arkansas Alumni Association, Rapert is a two-time U of A graduate with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration.

She returned to the University of Arkansas in 1991 after receiving her doctorate from the University of Memphis and teaches in the area of marketing management and global consumers. Passionate about teaching, she incorporates the unique approach of a readings-based, seminar-style undergraduate course that is designed in collaboration with her advisory board of 20 executives. In their evaluations and emails, her students often write that her classes are the best they have ever taken, often because of the energy and enthusiasm she brings to the classroom to make her class relevant to real-world experiences.

She is the recipient of the University of Arkansas Honors College Distinguished Faculty Award (2011), Marketing Management Association Top In Nation Teaching Award (2010), Beta Gamma Sigma Outstanding Teaching Award (2007), the Arkansas Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award (2002), the Walton College of Business Excellence in Teaching Award (2011, 2001, 1998), the Walton College of Business Excellence in Service Award (2006, 1993), and the Excellence in Advising Award (1996). Her research work has been published in various journals, and she has hosted numerous teaching workshops. She serves on the board of directors for the Walton College Alumni Society, among many other service activities. Each summer, Rapert travels to Italy, where she represents the University of Arkansas, teaching in the C.I.M.B.A. study-abroad program in Paderno del Grappa.