Every year the Carlson School welcomes new faculty members to its ranks. Recent additions to the school’s internationally ranked faculty have brought expertise in diverse fields of study and international backgrounds.

Two new professors—Jane Jenkins Ebert and Rachna Shah—are embarking at their careers at Carlson.

Ebert (at right), a new assistant professor in Marketing, began her studies in Cambridge, England, working in physics. She followed this with a doctorate in social psychology from Harvard and post-doctoral work in marketing at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Shah, assistant professor in Operations and Management Sciences, studied economics and mathematics at Delhi University in India, followed by an MBA/MHA and a doctorate in operations management from The Ohio State University.

And they both chose to come to the University of Minnesota’s business school. Their first year has been a transitional year of adjusting to Minnesota, joining their departments, teaching, and—as always—research.

In fact, research is what attracted Ebert to the Carlson School. Carlson has a reputation in academia as a world-class research school, she said, and her experience has confirmed that. Carlson takes research seriously, providing the resources and the time necessary for professors to invest in their areas of expertise, she said.

Ebert’s areas of expertise are marketing research and consumer behavior, and her current area of interest has to do with how people make decisions in which they have to trade off present and future concerns. She’s struck by how strongly people discount the future to act in shortsighted ways—for example, by eating unhealthily now in spite of potential health problems in the future, or by spending too much money now instead of saving for retirement.

These questions involve how people “value” the future or are motivated by its potentialities in relation to how they value the present, and the problem relates to a wide variety of issues, including healthcare. Ebert’s next steps are to apply her research to see how people with illness make decisions in light of future consequences. For example, she’s interested in how people make (or don’t make) the decision to undertake “unpleasant small things”—such as insulin injections or colonoscopies—for much larger future benefits.

She’s found her Marketing colleagues to be supportive and genuinely interested in her work, reinforcing her decision to come to Carlson. They’re a good group, Ebert said, academically impressive and great fun.

A similarly welcoming and supportive department has also contributed to Shah’s positive first year at Carlson. She said (with a surprised and delighted tone) that she was invited to lunch with colleagues almost every day of her first year here.

“It’s a very inclusive environment in every aspect: research activities, teaching and other service commitments,” Shah (at right) said. 

As evidence, she mentioned her involvement in two new research projects with the other faculty in the department, her membership in Ph.D. and undergraduate operations management curriculum committees, and her responsibility for organizing the operations management seminar series for the coming year. 

The Carlson environment is also a prestigious one. Carlson is known as one of the top schools for Shah’s field of study in operations management, making it a perfect fit for her background, she said. A number of faculty here specialize in examining the link between operational practices and firm performance. They then evaluate the linkage using survey data from real companies, rather than relying on developed mathematical models of firm performance evaluated using optimization techniques.

Shah’s specific area of interest is in lean production systems. She described lean production as an efficiency-based production system that aims to produce or deliver “the right amount of product at the right time to the right place in the right quality, by eliminating all waste from the value chain.” She’s interested in identifying strategic, organizational, and other contingent characteristics that distinguish lean companies from non-lean ones. She’s currently working on a number of papers on the subject.

She’ll also be teaching, as will Ebert. And that dream of free time? On the off chance that she gets any, “in theory” Ebert likes to run, eat out, and visit friends. Because she has two kids, Shah spends her free time at soccer games and piano practices.

Free time or no, Ebert and Shah are happy to be here. And the Carlson School is happy to have them.