College News Briefs

RANKINGS UPDATE

Executive MBA

Notre Dame Executive MBA jumped 11 spots to rank No. 15 in the Poets&Quants ranking of global EMBA programs released in May. Poets&Quants, a resource website for individuals interested in graduate business school education, ranked 48 programs using a composite score based on the four latest ratings on EMBA programs from Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, The Financial Times and U.S. News & World Report. A school must be ranked on at least two of the four lists to be included. Bloomberg Businessweek and The Economist both ranked ND EMBA as 15th in their most recent respective surveys.

Accounting

The undergraduate and graduate accountancy programs both ranked No. 4 in the nation in the most recent Public Accounting Report Annual Professors Survey, published in August. The PAR ranking is based entirely on the peer assessment of hundreds of accountancy faculty from nearly 200 U.S. institutions. 

Alumni Network

A strong alumni network is an increasingly critical factor that prospective students consider when choosing a graduate business program, and Notre Dame’s legendary network pushed Mendoza to the top of a recent ranking. The College ranked No. 3 on GraduatePrograms.com “20 Best Business Schools for Networking” survey released in September. The website allows students to score their schools in a variety of categories. The ranking was determined by scores for “Value of Network.” 

ONBOARDINGS

Gianna Bern became the director of the Notre Dame Master of Science in Finance, a new graduate degree program launching in January in Chicago. Bern, who also is an associate teaching professor of finance at Mendoza, is a founding principal of Chicago-based Brookshire Advisory and Research Inc., a research and consulting firm focused on the energy sector. She formerly served as a senior director of Fitch Ratings’ Corporate Finance Latin America Group, a division of the global ratings agency that focuses on oil, gas and utilities research in emerging markets of Central and South America. 

Bern also has held managerial positions at BP Plc. and Amoco Oil in energy economics, market analytics and risk management. She earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the Illinois Institute of Technology and an MBA in finance from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. A frequent media commentator on energy markets, Bern authored Investing in Energy: A Primer on the Economics of the Energy Industry, (Wiley & Sons) in June 2011. 

Don N. Kleinmuntz was named director of the Notre Dame Master of Science in Business Analytics, also a new graduate degree offered in Chicago starting in 2015. Kleinmuntz is a widely recognized industry expert in decision and risk analysis, business analytics and leveraging information technology to improve organizational decision making. He founded and previously served as senior executive at Strata Decision Technology, a provider of financial analytics software to the health care industry.

Kleinmuntz, who earned his bachelor’s, MBA and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago, also has held tenure-track or tenured faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin, the MIT Sloan School of Management and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as a part-time research appointment
at the University of Southern California.