Recent Foster PhD grads among Poets & Quants “40 under 40”
Two recent graduates of the Foster School’s PhD Program have been named among the “40 under 40 Most Outstanding MBA Professors” compiled by Poets & Quants, the influential MBA news site.
Allison Koester
Allison Koester (PhD 2011) is an assistant professor of accounting at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business. Since completing her degree at Foster, Koester has quickly become one of the most effective and popular instructors at the McDonough School, frequently converting unsuspecting MBA students into accounting enthusiasts.
Koester, who names her advisor at the Foster School, Terry Shevlin, as the professor she most admires, received McDonough’s Ronald L. Smith Distinguished Service Award in 2014.
In her research of corporate taxation and financial reporting, she has frequently collaborated with Foster faculty, including Jonathan Karpoff, the Washington Mutual Endowed Chair in Innovation Professor of Finance, Sarah McVay, the Deloitte & Touche Endowed Professor in Accounting, and Weili Ge, the Moss Adams Professor of Accounting.
Kai Chi (Sam) Yam
Kai Chi (Sam) Yam (PhD 2015) is an assistant professor of management at the National University of Singapore. Poets & Quants calls Yam a “prodigy” for his prodigious research productivity at the ripe young age of 27.
Since earning his doctorate in organizational behavior at Foster, he has already published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and the Journal of Business Ethics—and he has another 10 manuscripts under review.
While studying behavioral ethics, leadership and decision-making at Foster, Yam collected four best paper awards.
He cites advisors Scott Reynolds, an associate professor of business ethics and Weyerhaeuser Faculty Fellow at Foster, and Ryan Fehr, an assistant professor of management at Foster, as “excellent mentors and helping their students to succeed.”
Many of Yam’s studies are collaborations with Reynolds and Fehr, as well as Xiao-Ping Chen, a professor of management and the Philip M. Condit Endowed Chair in Business Administration, and Christopher Barnes, an assistant professor of management.
Yam and Koester join Thomas Gilbert, an assistant professor of finance at Foster, on the Poets & Quants “40 under 40” list.
Foster’s highly selective PhD Program—only 15 of 500 applicants are admitted each year—is rooted in the school’s prolific and influential research program.
The Financial Times recently ranked the Foster faculty 16th in the world, 13th in the nation and 4th among public universities in research productivity based on number of papers published in the top 45 scholarly journals representing every business discipline.
The “Top 100 Business School Research Rankings”—a list compiled by UT-Dallas that does not adjust for faculty size—names Foster 22nd in North America for papers published in the leading 24 business journals across disciplines.
