A New Dean for Fuqua

Breeden appointed to succeed Adams

Friday, January 12, 2001

Douglas T. Breeden, a finance scholar and entrepreneur who has founded and chaired successful consulting and financial management firms, has been selected as the new dean of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, President Nannerl O. Keohane announced Wednesday. Breeden is the Dalton McMichael Professor of Finance at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, whose faculty he joined last January. From 1985 to 1991, Breeden was a tenured member of the Fuqua School's faculty. He continued to teach at Fuqua from 1991 to 1999 as a research professor while concentrating on leading Smith Breeden Associates Inc., a consulting and money management firm he co-founded in 1982. "Doug Breeden's scholarly contributions, his longtime service to Fuqua both as a faculty member and as a member of the school's board of visitors, and his experience as a manager of highly successful banking and investment firms, equip him superbly to lead Fuqua at this exciting juncture in its development," Keohane said. "The Fuqua School's ambitious plans call for increasing its faculty by 50 percent over the next five years as well as the continued growth of its world-renowned corporate education program. Provost (Peter) Lange and I believe that Doug Breeden is the right person at this critical time to lead the Fuqua community in providing a superior education for tomorrow's leaders in a changing and dynamic global environment." "Thanks to a dedicated faculty and visionary leadership from both Tom Keller and, more recently, Rex Adams, Fuqua has earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the nation's top business schools. The challenges of leadership in a global economy require that the best business schools play a critical role in developing management skills and technical know-how, as well as managers who fully appreciate the ethical dimensions associated with their responsibilities," Breeden said. "I am especially impressed by the long-range plan Fuqua has developed calling for a significant deepening of the faculty and continued innovation in the use of technology to deliver management education. I look forward to working with Provost Lange, my faculty colleagues and the exceptional students we attract from across the world to expand Fuqua's horizons and contributions through creative approaches to global business education," Breeden said. Breeden received his undergraduate degree in management science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, and earned an M.A. in economics and a Ph.D. in finance from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. After completing his doctoral work, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. He subsequently taught at Stanford and MIT. He won the prestigious Batterymarch Faculty Fellowship Award and was a visiting professor at Yale University's School of Organization and Management and the Nomura School of Advanced Management in Tokyo. In 1982 he co-founded Smith Breeden Associates Inc., a money management firm with more than $10 billion under management for pension accounts, foundations, mutual funds and separate accounts. Smith Breeden Associates also consults with banks and savings and loans on risk management, specializing in mortgages. In 1999, he stepped down as CEO of Smith Breeden Associates and returned to teaching and research at Kenan-Flagler. He continues as chairman of Smith Breeden Associates. Breeden also has served as chairman of the board and/or principal shareholder of a number of Midwestern banks and thrifts, including Harrington Financial Group, Community First Financial Group of Indiana and Roosevelt Financial Group, which in 1997 merged with Mercantile Bancorporation Inc. Breeden's financial research has been cited more than 800 times in scholarly publications. In 1991 he founded the Journal of Fixed Income, and continues to serve as its editor. Breeden also has served as associate editor of a number of other leading finance publications including the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Financial Economics and Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. Breeden has been active in numerous community and philanthropic activities. He served as a member of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Public School Board from 1989 to 1993, and is a board member of the Fund for Human Possibilities, a foundation that supports the education of talented at-risk students. He is chairman of the Breeden Family Foundation, which has funded library, community center and town hall renovations in his home state of Indiana. Breeden also has been a member of grant societies at Duke, Stanford and MIT, has funded prizes for the best articles published in the Journal of Finance and helped create faculty chairs at MIT, Stanford and the University of Chicago. In addition to serving on Fuqua's board of visitors, Breeden is a member of both the Dean's Advisory Council and the Visiting Committee of MIT's Sloan School of Management. He also has held leadership positions in a number of professional associations, including election as a member of the board of directors from 1988-1991 of the American Finance Association. Breeden and his wife Josie live in Chapel Hill with their four children. Duke's business school was founded in 1969. It was renamed the Fuqua School of Business in 1980 with a $10 million gift from Atlanta industrialist and former Duke trustee J. B. Fuqua. In 2000, Business Week magazine ranked Fuqua among the top five business school in the United States. Fuqua has campuses in Durham and Frankfurt, Germany, and offers four MBA program formats: The Duke MBA, a daytime program; The Duke MBA-Global Executive; the Duke MBA-Cross Continent; and the Duke MBA-Weekend Executive. The school also offers executive education non-degree courses in a variety of business subjects and is principal of the recently established Duke Corporate Education Inc., a private company that specializes in customized executive education and e-learning consulting.