Jiambalvo named Dean of the Year by Poets & Quants

Jim Jiambalvo, the Orin and Janet Smith Dean of the University of Washington Foster School of Business, has been named Dean of the Year by Poets & Quants, the influential business school news site.

Jiambalvo has led the Foster School since 2005 and has served on its faculty since 1977. In July of 2019 he will return to his post as a professor of accounting and pass on the deanship to Frank Hodge, the Michael G. Foster Endowed Professor of Accounting and chair of the Department of Accounting.

“When [Jiambalvo] departs the deanship in July… he will leave a school that has been enduringly transformed in every way,” notes Poets & Quants.

The site counts several marquee accomplishments during Jiambalvo’s tenure as dean, including the construction of three world-class facilities—PACCAR Hall, Dempsey Hall and the forthcoming Founders Hall—to round out the school’s modern campus, the raising of nearly $400 million in private support across two capital campaigns, the hiring of 50 new faculty members and an unprecedented rise in rankings prestige.

This “extraordinary job,” Poets & Quants adds, has been done by an “unassuming academic.”

“Much like the legendary Don Jacobs, the professor who guided the Kellogg School to new heights and became the most influential business school dean of his generation, Jiambalvo has quietly yet very consciously led Foster on a mission to become the best public business school in the nation. Both deans… smartly leveraged their business communities in the climb, Jacobs in Chicago and Jiambalvo in Seattle, thanks to a dynamic economy driven by the explosive growth of Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Costco, Nordstrom and Boeing. Both deans never sought the spotlight, instead preferring to do the hard work necessary to recruit top faculty and students and put them in an environment where they could do their best work.”

As one of only eight Poets & Quants Deans of the Year, Jiambalvo finds himself in elite company with Jacobs and the visionary leaders of Harvard Business School, the Yale School of Management, Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Read more about Poets & Quants’ Dean of the Year.

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