School of Accounting

Stephen Lin, associate professor and Knight Ridder Center Research professor; and assistant professors Abijit Barua and John (Changjiang) Wang, won a highly competitive “IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) Ready” award from the PricewaterhouseCoopers Charitable Foundation to fund their curriculum development proposal titled “Integrating IFRS in both accounting-major undergraduate and Master of Accounting programs at Florida International University (FIU).” With this award, FIU joins a prestigious group of universities developing new curricula to teach IFRS.

Robert McGee, director, Center for Accounting, Auditing, and Tax Studies (CAATS), won two awards recently. He received a research award for a paper titled “Economic Protectionism and the Philosophy of Frederic Bastiat.” He presented the paper at the 2010 International Academy of Business and Public Administration Disciplines Winter Conference held in Orlando, Florida from January 3-6, 2010 in the category of Contemporary Business Issues. He also received the “Best Empirical Paper” award for a paper his co-author presented at the 22nd Australasian Tax Teachers Association Conference, January 22, 2010, in Sydney, Australia. The paper was titled “Three Studies on Human Values and Beliefs: Cheating on Taxes in Australia and New Zealand.”

Department of Finance and Real Estate

William Hardin, director, Real Estate Programs, professor and Knight Ridder Center Research Professor, will become the director of the Jerome Bain Real Estate Institute when its current director, John Zdanowicz, professor and Florida International Bankers Association Chair (FIBA), steps down at the end of summer 2010. Zdanowicz will return to the faculty as a full professor.

Department of Decision Sciences and Information Systems

Steve Zanakis, professor, visited Montevideo, Uruguay last summer to begin discussions about creating a center at ORT University—a partner institution in the business school’s Dual Degree network—to develop customer satisfaction survey benchmarks for a couple of industries; he would serve as the technical advisor. By contributing to the project through the appropriate government ministry in the country, businesses will get a significant tax write-off. In addition to this project, Zanakis started mentoring half a dozen part-time faculty at ORT who are working on their dissertations at a Spanish university, by reviewing their progress and advising on the design, data collection and statistical analyses of the results.