Professor Amit Khandelwal has been appointed director of The Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business, effective July 1. He assumes the role most recently held by Professor Wei Jiang, who will assume the role of Vice Dean for Curriculum and Instruction on July 1. "I know the entire Chazen team is excited to work with Amit, and I hope you will join me in congratulating him on his new role, as well as thanking Wei for her leadership," said Dean Glenn Hubbard.
Khandelwal joined the School as an assistant professor in the Finance and Economics Division in 2007, and he held the Gary Winnick and Martin Granoff Associate Professorship of Business from 2013 to 2015. He has had a tremendous impact as a teacher in both the MBA and EMBA programs, successfully leading the Global Immersion Program in China, an International Seminar in India, and several courses in global business and emerging markets. For 25 years, the Chazen Institute has coordinated all of the Business School's major international programs, activities, and resources, and today it serves as the hub for global business research and instruction at the University. "This is exactly aligned with my interests," says Khandelwal, expressing his excitement about the appointment. "The Chazen Institute focuses on international business, and in particular on emerging markets, and that’s more or less what the focus of my research and teaching has been since I joined Columbia. [Further], the institute serves as a bridge between research, teaching, and industry. It's exactly where I see myself as an educator at the Business School."
Khandelwal will work with Josh Safier, executive director of the Chazen Institute, to oversee research and curriculum, event programming, and strategy. In the short term, he says he will focus on making sure the international trips continue to be as successful as they have been thus far, as well as "trying to represent new markets that we haven’t gone to in the past. For example, we'll be hopefully doing more trips to Southeast Asia and to countries that I think students may not necessarily travel to on their own. I think that's where the institute provides the most added value." Khandelwal will also be working with Safier to raise the visibility of the Chazen Institute within the Business School, across the University, and among the community at large. To that end, in addition to organizing conferences and lectures with high-profile speakers, Khandelwal says they hope to "get more active participation among the faculty members who are aligned with Chazen, to get their research out to the press to try to showcase what the Chazen Institute is [doing]."
In the longer term, Khandelwal says he hopes to continue strengthening the connection between research and practice. "I see the Chazen Institute as being this unique place where ideas that faculty members are working on meet the practitioners. Often this dialogue runs past each other. We’ve got really deep expertise here within the Business School, and I think there’s lots of demand for this type of relevant experience by practitioners and policy makers. My ultimate goal — what I would consider success at the end of my tenure — is if we're able to create a better bridge between the two groups."
