Business-school news site Poets & Quants has named Dr. Naim Bugra Ozel, an associate professor of accounting at the Naveen Jindal School of Management, one of the Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors. The recognition takes into account the research productivity of faculty over the last five years as well as their teaching prowess.
Ozel has recently returned to the Jindal School after spending two years as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he received The Wharton School’s 2020 teaching excellence award for his financial and managerial accounting class. Ozel said he is excited about returning after gaining new perspectives on research, teaching and school culture.
“At Jindal, I am among a bright and enthusiastic group of people, several of whom have earned some of the highest recognitions for their research in their fields,” he said. “The high quality of teaching is a reflection of this research productivity.”
Ozel joined the Jindal School in 2015 and taught the graduate-level financial and managerial accounting class — for which he received rave reviews. “It is an exceptionally designed course, supplemented with an amazing faculty,” one student commented.
“Professor Ozel is out of this world. I couldn’t have asked for a more superior grad school experience.” said another.
Ozel’s research focuses on corporate disclosure and compliance issues. He has published in top academic journals in accounting, and his work has received attention from leading media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg and Harvard Business Review. His recent work explores issues related to labor law compliance and shows how firms are using job titles to avoid overtime payments.
Another study he is working on examines whether disclosures in IPO prospectuses make firms more vulnerable to predatory lawsuits.
“The Jindal School has been attracting some of the best professors in the nation and has demonstrated impressive growth in terms of research productivity over the last decade,” Ozel said. He added that he looks forward to catching up with his colleagues at UT Dallas and discussing new research projects.
As young as UT Dallas is, he said, it “has all the right ingredients to become one of those top schools. I think it is entertaining and satisfying to know that you contribute to a university that is on a path to become one of the top universities in the nation.”
He added that he is interested in contributing to the community as well as in helping provide equal education opportunities for underrepresented groups in the corporate world. Ozel is involved with Girls Who Invest, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing gender diversity in investment management.
Ozel will be teaching Introductory Financial Accounting (ACCT 2301) in the undergraduate program at the Jindal School in spring 2022.
