Several professorship appointments have been made in the Sloan School of Management.
Michael B. Mikhail, assistant professor of management, has been selected as the inaugural holder of the Theodore T. Miller Career Development Professorship for a three-year term beginning July 1, 1999. The chair was recently established by bequest of Mr. Theodore T. Miller (SB 1922).
Professor Mikhail received the BS in 1986 in computer science and the MAS in 1988 in accounting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received the MBA (1997) and PhD (1999) in accounting and economics from the University of Chicago.
He has been an assistant professor of management in the Sloan School since 1997. Previously, he was a teaching assistant at the University of Chicago (1992-93), a senior consultant at Arthur Andersen & Co. (1988-92) and a teaching assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Professor Mikhail's principal research interests are in the use of financial information by capital market participants, primarily security analysts. His work exploring the determinants of analysts' forecasting ability and stock recommendation profitability has appeared in the Journal of Accounting Research and the Accounting Review. He also studies the role of ownership structure on tax-planning aggressiveness and earnings management.
Yashan Wang, assistant professor of management science in the Sloan School of Management, has been selected to hold a Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professorship.
Professor Wang received the BS in electrical engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1988, the MS in operations research from the University of Kentucky in 1993 and the PhD in management science from Columbia University in 1998.
Professor Wang joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor at Sloan in 1997. He worked as a teaching and research assistant at Columbia University from 1993-97. His fields of interest include inventory control, manufacturing and logistics systems, applied probability and simulation.
JoAnne Yates, professor of communication, information and organization studies, has been named as a Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management.
Her interdisciplinary research, both historical and contemporary, studies how the use of communication within firms shapes and is shaped over time by its organizational, managerial and technological contexts. Her prize-winning book Control Through Communication: The Rise of Systems in American Management focuses on the evolution of communication systems in American businesses from 1850-1920. She is currently writing a book on the life insurance industry's adoption and use of information technology in the twentieth century. She also studies the use of contemporary electronic media in organizations.
Professor Yates holds the BA from Texas Christian University (1974), and the MA (1975) and PhD (1980) from the University of North Carolina. Her initial MIT appointment was as assistant professor of business communications in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies from 1980-84. Since then, she has held Sloan School positions as lecturer (1984-86) and senior lecturer (1986-91) in management communication, associate professor in management communication and information studies (1991-94), associate professor with tenure (1994-99), and professor of communication, information and organization studies since July 1999.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on December 15, 1999.
