Diane McNulty received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the DFW Alliance of Technology and Women at its 2021 Women in Tech Summit on Sept. 28.

In more than three decades of service to The University of Texas at Dallas, McNulty began and has built the communications and development departments in the Jindal School, where she is associate dean of external relations, communications and corporate development, and serves as executive editor of Management magazine. The award recognized those efforts as well as her longtime dedication to empowering women and her service to the alliance.

The alliance is a nonprofit committed to increasing the number of women in leadership and strengthening the pipeline of girls entering technology fields.

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Business-school news site Poets & Quants last summer named Naim Bugra Ozel, an associate professor of accounting, one of the Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors of 2021. The recognition took into account the research productivity of faculty over the last five years as well as their teaching prowess.

Ozel returned to the Jindal School in the summer after spending two years as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he received The Wharton School’s 2020 teaching excellence award for his financial and managerial accounting class. Ozel said he was excited to return after gaining new perspectives on research, teaching and school culture.

Ozel joined the Jindal School in 2015 and taught the graduate-level financial and managerial accounting class — for which he received rave reviews.

His research focuses on corporate disclosure and compliance issues. He has published in top academic journals in accounting, and his work has received attention from leading media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg and Harvard Business Review.

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The Texas Society for Certified Public Accountants named faculty member Mary Beth Goodrich an Outstanding Accounting Educator of the Year. The society recognized her and other winners on a Sept. 10 Facebook Live virtual event.

Goodrich, a professor of instruction in the Accounting Area, won the award in the Large Colleges/Universities category. The accolade followed a UT Dallas President’s Teaching Excellence Award she received in April. Goodrich attributed both awards to her teaching style, which involves adaptability and creativity, especially when it comes to working in various learning modalities.

“If students feel like you care, they end up doing better,” Goodrich said. “Building those relationships is one of the reasons why we have so many students tell their friends to go to UTD. It actually is like a family. It gives me a lot of joy to help a student find a new job and start a career somewhere.”

Previous JSOM winners of the TXCPA Society award are Jennifer Johnson, an associate professor of instruction, and Kathy Zolton, an associate professor of practice, both in accounting. Johnson won in 2017, and Zolton won in 2015. Liliana Hickman-Riggs, MS’93, who taught accounting from 1996 to 2011, won in 2004.

Other TXCPA Society honorees this year with JSOM ties include Art Agulnek, an Accounting Area faculty member from 2002 to 2018. Now retired, Agulnek was one of two recipients of the society Distinguished Member 2020-2021 award.

Alumna Lisa Ong, MS’14, a past chair of the Dallas chapter of the society, was named an Outstanding Committee Chairman. She leads the Diversity and Inclusion Committee of the Dallas chapter.

Three Jindal School researchers won a best paper award for their study that devised a way to reduce sepsis-related patient mortality using a data-driven algorithm.

Özalp Özer, George and Fonsa Brody Professor in Management and a professor in the Operations Management Area, Mehmet Ayvaci, an associate professor in the Information Systems Area, and Zahra Mobini, a PhD candidate, took first place in the 2021 College of Healthcare Operations Management’s (CHOM) Best Paper Competition. CHOM is the healthcare subsidiary of the Production and Operations Management Society.

According to the paper, “To Catch a Killer: A Data-Driven Personalized and Compliance-Aware Sepsis Alert System,” sepsis — a potentially life-threatening blood infection — affects 1.5 million patients and contributes to as many as half of all hospital deaths in the U.S. every year. The researchers developed an algorithm to detect sepsis early by creating patient-specific alerts while considering caregivers’ compliance behavior.

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Ningzhong Li, associate professor of accounting, and his research colleagues won second place in the 2021 MIT Asia Conference in Accounting best paper competition last summer. Their winning entry, “Using Economic Links Between Firms to Detect Accounting Fraud,” examines whether economic links between companies can be used to detect accounting fraud.

“Our paper adds to the literature by showing that using financial data of other firms that are economically linked to the focal firm, in particular customers, is helpful in fraud detection,” Li and fellow researchers, Chenchen Li, a Jindal School 2021 PhD graduate now an assistant professor at Nanjing University, and Frank Zhang, a professor of accounting at Yale University, wrote.

Gaurav Shekhar, director of the MS In Business Analytics Flex and Online programs, and an assistant professor in the Information Systems Area, earned the Presidential Citation at the Toastmasters International 2021 Virtual Convention in August.

Given at the discretion of the international president of Toastmasters, the citation recognizes members who have continually supported and shown dedication to the organization. Richard E. Peck, the 2020-2021 international president, is a 2004 Global Leadership MBA graduate of the Jindal School. In all, Peck chose 20 members from the organization’s 300,000 members worldwide to receive the citation.

Administrative Changes

Melissa Bettis, who joined the Jindal School in 2019 as a director of development, was appointed interim assistant dean for development and alumni relations in September. Her appointment followed the departure of Doug Anderson, who left the University.

Bettis is responsible for Jindal School fundraising and alumni engagement functions.

During 20 years as a nonprofit fundraiser, Bettis has served as chief development officer for the Samaritan Inn in McKinney and, prior to that, as national director of the March of Dimes Foundation for 17 years.

Teaching and Staff Award Winners Announced

The 2020-2021 Outstanding Faculty and Staff Award winners were announced in September.

A teaching awards committee chose faculty winners, and a staff awards committee selected one JSOM staff employee for recognition. Winners each received $2,000 and a commemorative plaque.

Honorees were:

Kathy Zolton, associate professor of practice in accounting — Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award

Rebecca Files, associate professor in accounting and associate director of research for the Institute for Excellence in Corporate Governance — Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award

Edward Meda, assistant professor of practice in the Organizations, Strategy and International Management Area — Outstanding Online Teaching Award

Norman Thompson, a lecturer in the BS in Information Technology and Systems program — Outstanding Teaching by an Adjunct Faculty Member Award

Nan Guo, a PhD in International Management Studies student, and Jake Smith, a PhD in Management Science, Finance Concentration, student — Outstanding Teaching by a Teaching Assistant Award

Jamie Selander, PhD programs administrator — Outstanding Staff Award.