Trustees name six faculty members J. Thomas Clark Professors

The Cornell Board of Trustees has named six faculty members J. Thomas Clark Professors of Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise. The three-year appointments foster participation in the Entrepreneurship@Cornell program by providing funds for developing new courses, integrating entrepreneurship into existing courses or engaging in research in the areas of new business creation, innovation and/or development.

J. Thomas Clark '63, MBA '64, and Nancy Williams Clark '62, M. Ed. '64, created the Clark Endowment in 1993. Since that time, 19 Cornell professors have held Clark Professorships.

Appointed to Clark Professorships for 2006-09 were Susan Christopherson, professor, Department of City and Regional Planning, College of Architecture, Art and Planning; Sheila Danko, associate professor, Department of Design and Environmental Analysis, College of Human Ecology; Per Pinstrup-Andersen, H.E. Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy, Division of Nutritional Sciences and Department of Applied Economics and Management; Zachary Shulman, senior lecturer, The Johnson School; Judy Siguaw, dean, Cornell-Nanyang Institute of Hospitality Management and professor, School of Hotel Administration; and Wesley Sine, assistant professor, The Johnson School.

Christopherson will develop courses and experiential learning projects that help students gain a better understanding of the creative economy. She will develop an undergraduate course on the "creative economy" and an experiential workshop to enable students to learn entrepreneurial skills in art, architecture and other creative fields. She also will create a Web site documenting entrepreneurial strategies in the creative economy.

Danko was elected to a second term as a Clark professor. She will expand upon five scholarly case studies and a strategic story database illustrating the special challenges unique to values-led entrepreneurship. Danko will expand the case collection to include more mature cases and cross-case comparison.

Pinstrup-Andersen will focus on enhancing student training in policy analysis for the global food system, with the overall purpose of reducing poverty and hunger and promoting sustainable development, including sustainable management of natural resources. He will develop new courses at Cornell and at collaborating institutions that will include a social entrepreneurship approach.

Shulman will continue to develop and expand BR Legal (BRL), a program in which Cornell Law School students work under the supervision of volunteer attorneys to provide affordable legal services to persons exploring new business formation or issues of intellectual property.

Siguaw was elected to a second term as a Clark professor. During her first term she developed a course, Sales for Entrepreneurs, that attracted 80 students in 2004. The renewal will allow Siguaw to teach the course to the inaugural class of Cornell-Nanyang Institute in spring 2007.

Sine's research focuses on entrepreneurship, institutions and the emergence of new technology sectors. He has examined these topics in a diverse set of economic contexts, ranging from the electric power industry to the Internet sector.

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