24 May 2024

Professors Receive Wyss Awards for Excellence in Mentoring Doctoral Students

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BOSTON—Two Harvard Business School (HBS) faculty members, Professor Ryan Buell and Associate Professor Eva Ascarza, have been awarded Wyss Awards for Excellence in Mentoring Doctoral Students. Every year, HBS doctoral students select faculty to receive Wyss Awards for their work in the Doctoral Programs.

The winners and runner-up were selected from a pool of faculty nominees. In keeping with tradition, the main advisors of the selection committee chairs and award recipients from the past five years were excluded from consideration. For the outstanding nominations he received, faculty member Ryan Raffaelli, the Marvin Bower Associate Professor, has been chosen as the runner-up.

Professor Ryan Buell

Ryan Buell is the C.D. Spangler Professor of Business Administration in the Technology and Operations Management Unit and the faculty chair of the Transforming Customer Experiences Executive Education program. His research investigates the interactions between service businesses and their customers, and how operational choices affect customer behaviors and firm performance.

“Ryan provided me with exemplary mentorship through a hybrid approach,” one student said. “He added me to an existing research program that allowed me to learn research best practices using an apprenticeship model. I was exposed to other faculty, learned how to apply the research methods I learned in the classroom, and was able to participate in a new scope of projects.”

Associate Professor Eva Ascarza

Eva Ascarza, the Jakurski Family Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Marketing Unit, is a marketing modeler who uses tools from statistics, economics, and machine learning to answer marketing questions. Her research focuses on customer management, personalization, and targeting; marketing AI; and algorithmic decision making. She is the co-founder of the Customer Intelligence Lab at the D^3 Institute at HBS.

“Eva’s mentorship is unparalleled,” one student noted, commenting on the significant time Ascarza dedicated to supporting doctoral students. “She dedicated over 10 hours a week to engage with different students, underscoring a significant investment in their academic and personal development.”

The Wyss Awards are named in honor of Hansjoerg Wyss (MBA 1965) who, in 2004, established the Hansjoerg Wyss Endowment for Doctoral Education. The Wyss Endowment supports a broad range of efforts to strengthen the HBS Doctoral Programs, including fellowships and stipends for doctoral students, increased support for field research, new doctoral course development, teaching skills training, and the renovation of doctoral facilities on campus.

Contacts

Mark Cautela
mcautela+hbs.edu
617-365-9547

About Harvard Business School

Founded in 1908 as part of Harvard University, Harvard Business School is located on a 40-acre campus in Boston. Its faculty of more than 250 offers full-time programs leading to the MBA and PhD degrees, as well as more than 175 Executive Education programs, and Harvard Business School Online, the School’s digital learning platform. For more than a century, faculty have drawn on their research, their experience in working with organizations worldwide, and their passion for teaching, to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. The School and its curriculum attract the boldest thinkers and the most collaborative learners who will go on to shape the practice of business and entrepreneurship around the globe.