Message from the Dean

We are in the middle of another exciting and busy fall semester at the Naveen Jindal School of Management. I am excited to share with you the “big” news; on October 8th we broke ground for our third building. I am pleased to announce that we have designed a beautiful new facility that is going to contain state-of-the-art classrooms, labs and lecture studios. It will house our undergraduate programs as well as our executive education operations. It has many indoor and outdoor spaces for our students, faculty and staff to relax and interact. The building is planned to be 127,000 sq. ft. When completed in late spring 2026, we will have a total of nearly half a million square feet of world class facilities dedicated to our School.

This year’s Scholarship Breakfast, the Jindal School’s largest fundraiser, followed the groundbreaking by one day and was a big success. We raised more than $120,000 for student scholarships and were treated to a presentation by one of the Jindal School’s distinguished alumni, Dr. Sulman Ahmed, BS’01, founder, chairman and CEO of DECA Dental Group. We also announced an endowed scholarship, the Dr. Sulman Ahmed Scholarship Fund, a permanent endowment for the support of students in the Jindal School’s Young Scholars Program, which serves predominantly underrepresented and first-generation students.

Our School is known for academic programs that prepare students to utilize quantitative, analytical methods and Information technology tools to solve business problems. In keeping with maintaining our status as innovators at the forefront of technology, we have been busy updating our curricula and developing new programs. As part of these efforts, we held our first annual Cybersecurity Day this semester with a panel of chief information security officers at various corporations and organizations. Our keynote speaker was Ron Mehring, CISO of Texas Health Resource.

Another area of significant interest is AI. Over the past year, we have been busy updating our degree programs to address the changes that are taking place in business practice due to the new AI tools that are being rapidly deployed by companies. AI is already transforming the way we work. We are educating our students to have the skills to take on these jobs that are changed or created by AI. This semester we have over 500 Undergraduate and 1600 Masters students enrolled in our Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence degree programs. That is more than 20 percent of our total enrollment. We have also developed and are redeveloping new courses and updating our existing courses to infuse the impact of AI in all of our degree programs such as marketing, finance, supply chain etc. We are also establishing a leadership position in the study and practice of AI in Business Schools. Last spring we hosted the first annual conference “Biz AI Conference: AI Applications in Business Research”. The conference was a big hit with over 150 attendees coming from 67 different universities. AI and related issues are also addressed in other meetings that we organize such as the 16th Annual Project Management Symposium that we offered this summer and 22’nd Conference on Corporate Governance that we held earlier this month. It is safe to say that companies need workers with AI skills in nearly every field and we at the Jindal School are leading the way in preparing our students for those jobs.

Our outstanding faculty members have been making news as academic thought leaders. A change in the U.S. Department of Labor’s nationwide overtime rules was inspired by research conducted by Jindal School researchers. The study was conducted by Dr. Umit Gurun, Stan Liebowitz Distinguished Professor of Accounting; Dr. Bugra Ozel, an associate professor of Accounting both of are members of our School; and a fellow researcher from Harvard. The change in the rules will benefit about 4.3 million U.S. workers.

Dr. Mike Peng, O.P. Jindal Distinguished Chair and a professor in the Organizations, Strategy and International Management Area, was elected as president of Asia Academy of Management (AAOM). Peng and fellow researchers who happen to be PhD alumni from the Jindal School won a Best Paper award from the International Management Division of the Academy of Management for their work investigating the acquisition strategies of emerging multi-national enterprises from emerging economies.

Dr. Hyesook Chung, an assistant professor in the Jindal School’s Organizations, Strategy and International Management Area, received a Best Convention Paper award from the Human Resources Division of the Academy of Management for a study that explores the effects on employees following company mergers and acquisitions.

In student news, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) recognized the UT Dallas-JSOM student chapter with a Cum Laude designation. Dr. Monica Brussolo, the faculty advisor, was awarded the INFORMS2024 Chapter Moving Spirit Award. This year our undergraduate program presented its inaugural Undergraduate Student Conference, allowing many to experience an academic conference for the first time while equipping all of them with tools for academic and professional success. As always our students participate in may regional and national competitions and make us proud with many top awards.

I am happy to share with you a new program at the Jindal School, Nash Leaders, was launched last spring. This program helps develop leadership qualities in JSOM students. It is named after and is supported by an endowment created by JSOM alumnus Ron Nash, who is a North Texas business leader and recipient of the 2011 UT Dallas Distinguished Alumni Award. He is also a life member of the UT Dallas Executive Board and a member and past chairman of the Jindal School’s Advisory Council.

We continue to improve our rankings, solidifying our position among the top public business schools in the nation. In the most recent ranking news, our graduate program in supply chain management maintained its No. 4 ranking in the Gartner Supply Chain University Top 25 among North American universities while our BS in supply chain management and analytics moved up two places to No. 6. U.S. New & World Report ranked our Professional MBA program at No. 8 (tied) among public university programs and No. 13 (tied) overall in its 2024 Best Part-Time MBA Programs. Fortune ranked our Executive MBA program at No. 9 among public programs and No. 16 overall in its Best Executive MBA Programs 2024.

It has been a busy semester, but one that has been fruitful and rewarding. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone connected to the Jindal school — students, faculty, alumni, friends and supporters — for your generous support in both your time, talent and gifts. We are truly grateful to you. Nothing we do would be possible without your support.

Dr. Hasan Pirkul
Dean and Caruth Chair of Management