For Joseph Engelberg, the decision to pursue a career in finance was an easy one to make – it meant he would be continuing the “family business.” A native of San Diego, the Rady School professor of finance’s father worked as an accountant and introduced him to finance early on in his childhood, sparking an interest in business and leading him to earn a B.A. in mathematics and a B.S. in business administration at the University of Southern California (USC).
While academia was not Engelberg’s initial field of interest in college, he developed a curiosity for it when he worked as a research specialist under one of his USC professors at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“It was eye-opening professionally and personally,” Engelberg said. “I’m thankful for the experiences that I was able to have because of that opportunity.”
After being exposed to the world of academia, Engleberg decided to embrace his newfound interest in research by pursuing a Ph.D. in Finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. While there, he became interested in observing the behavior of individuals within the stock market, later publishing a paper with fellow students on the effect of Jim Cramer’s show “Mad Money” had on stock pricing. His research has been referenced in national publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Los Angeles Times, , and the Chicago Sun Times.
Engleberg’s first teaching position was as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flager Business School, where he taught finance for three years. Engelberg would later return to San Diego and commit to a teaching position at the Rady School of Management because he enjoyed the school’s startup environment.
“I’ve had a chance to really influence the direction of things with the school,” Engelberg said. “It was a unique opportunity to merge my interests in finance with the exciting world of entrepreneurship.”
Engelberg’s main area of research is behavioral finance, which combines finance with insights about individual behavior from psychology. Traditionally, finance academics have thought investors act rationally when making financial decisions. Behavioral finance researchers like Engelberg think that investors are not completely rational and make mistakes which are predicted in the psychology literature. Engelberg and other behavioralists believe these mistakes can affect trading and prices in the stock market.
For anyone interested in behavioral finance or behavioral economics more generally, Engelberg recommends reading the books, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” by Daniel Kahneman, and “Misbehaving,” by Richard Thaler, as they introduce the topic and describe ways in which the research has been applied to real life.
Other fields of interest Engelberg enjoys pursuing include financial media, information processing, and financial networks.
Rady School of Management Professor Kevin Zhu recently received a prestigious honor at the 2018 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Annual Meeting. Zhu was recognized as a Distinguished Fellow of the INFORMS Information Systems Society for his outstanding intellectual contributions to the information systems discipline. Three scholars received the highest honor in the field of 3,000 scholars worldwide.
As the first information systems expert at UC San Diego, Zhu has significantly expanded the wealth of knowledge on campus, instructing undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. students, and bringing key conferences to campus.
Hundreds of business leaders and entrepreneurs have emerged from the Rady School of Management since the School began in 2003. Alumni have joined the ranks of leading corporations or industry changing companies, or launched startups of their own. When asked about their success, these alumni have all attributed their accomplishments to the support, insight and guidance of Rady School faculty.
The Rady School of Management welcomes Robert Sanders as an Assistant Professor of Marketing. Sanders joins the Rady School from the University of Chicago where he earned his Ph.D. in Business Administration in the Quantitative Marketing and Economics track. He will teach Research for Marketing Decisions for the MBA program in fall 2018.
Uri Gneezy’s research focuses on putting behavioral economics to work in the real world, where theory can meet application. How do incentives motivate people to work harder or change their behavior? These are questions often asked by behavioral economists – researchers who study psychology as it relates to the economic decisions.
Rady School of Management Professor