Our Graduates Are among 2021’s Best 40-Under-40 Professors

Poets & Quants news website, which has made a name for itself with its publications about undergraduate and graduate business education in the United States, listed The Best 40 Business School Professors Under 40. Naim Buğra Özel, a graduate of ITU Industrial Engineering and Management Engineering Departments (double major, high honor), and Oğuz A. Acar, who completed his bachelor's and master’s education in ITU Management Engineering are among 2021’s Best 40-Under-40 Professors.

Our graduate Naim Buğra Özel, who has ITU Industrial Engineering B.S. (2005) and Management Engineering B.S. (2004; double major, high honor) degrees, and  Oğuz A. Acar, who has  B.S. (2005) and M.S. (2009) degrees in Management Engineering, are the two names from Turkey who entered 2021’s Best 40-Under-40 Professors list. The website featured the stories of our graduates broadly.

Naim Buğra Özel is an associate professor of accounting at the University of Texas at Dallas but visiting at The Wharton School since 2019. Coming from a family of accountants and bankers, Özel says it was clear to him he’d be a professor of some sort all the way back in the fifth grade when his dad started calling him “the professor.”

Özel is an award-winning professor, earning recognitions like the Dean George W. Robbins Award for Teaching Excellence from UCLA in 2014, The Wharton School’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2020, and he was a Jindal School Faculty Idol of the Year Finalist in 2019.

With his research featured in outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Harvard Business Review, Özel says, “Most of my work focuses on how labor, legal, and tax considerations come into play in corporate disclosure and financing decisions. For example, one of my papers shows how firms cut corners in workplace safety when in danger of missing analysts’ earnings expectations. In another one, we find that firms tend to strategically use managerial job titles to avoid paying overtime.”

Istanbul Technical University Management Engineering B.S. (2005) and Istanbul Technical University Management Engineering M.S. (2009) graduate Oğuz A. Acar is another name in 2021’s Best 40-Under-40 Professors.

Dr. Oğuz A. Acar is a professor in marketing at City University of London’s Bayes Business School. In addition to teaching marketing, Acar is the Director of the Marketing Strategy & Innovation master’s program at Bayes.

According to some of his nominators, Acar will sometimes open his classes with a guided meditation or playing with Legos building blocks. In addition to his unique approach to classroom teaching, students rave about his empathy and passion that made his classes stand out. A strong researcher, Acar also has nearly 500 Google Scholar citations, mainly exploring the intersection of marketing, innovation, and behavioral science.

“One recent discovery we have made is that crowdfunding is more than just about money –it also has psychological consequences for non-involved consumers (i.e., the entire market of a firm’s potential customers),” Acar says of his research.

We congratulate our graduates for their achievements in the international arena.

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