IESE professors Manel Baucells, Pablo Fernández, and Steven A. Y. Poelmans were presented with the Research Excellence Awards at the Executive Committee meeting of the IESE Alumni Association this week. This year marks the third anniversary of the awards, which were created with the aim of supporting research and encouraging the development of business management research and teaching at IESE.

The ceremony was held at IESE's Barcelona campus and broadcast by videoconference to IESE's Madrid campus. The panel of seven judges, which include faculty from IESE, Harvard and MIT, base their evaluations on contributions made to academic publications with international reach as well as the consistent research trajectories of the candidates.  Additionally, they consider the relevance of the research to the business world.

The award recipients' areas of research span diverse fields. Manel Baucells, Assistant Professor of Managerial Economics, focuses his work on decision-making analysis and his research has added significantly to the area of stochastic dominance. He has suggested evidence to help support empirical studies that have been carried out in this field.  Baucells' contributions are marked by his many publications and prizes and his international network of collaborators.

Finance professor Pablo Fernandez has centered his research on company valuation making important impacts on both the academic and the business worlds. His work has been published in many academic and mainstream publications, and he has three important books on his area of expertise. Fernández occupies third place in the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) list of top authors, beaten only by Prof. Michael Jensen of Harvard Business School and Eugene Fama of the University of Chicago.

Steven Poelmans, Assistant Professor of Managing People in Organizations, researches the well-being of employees and business leaders in an effort to understand the underlying beliefs and mechanisms of healthy and unhealthy employment practices. He has participated in numerous international studies published in leading academic journals focused on work-related stress and has published two books on the subject.

The jury members this year were:

• Prof. Jordi Canals, IESE
• Prof. Pankaj Ghemawat, Harvard Business School
• Antonio González-Adalid, Vice-President of the IESE Alumni Association
• Prof. Tom Malone, MIT Sloan School of Management
• José Martínez-Rovira, President  of the IESE Alumni Association
• Prof. Joan E. Ricart, IESE
• Rafael Villaseca, Member of the IESE Alumni Association's Executive Committee