Marketing Professor and Brandon C. Coleman, Jr. ’78 Chair Venkatesh Shankar is the new chair of the Marketing Strategy Special Interest Group for the American Marketing Association Academic Division. He takes on the role for the next two years, with a vice chair in Mays’ marketing PhD graduate Satish Jayachandran, now an associate professor at the University of South Carolina.

Shankar’s goals? To help shape the research agenda for marketing strategy and develop ties with academics who don’t participate in the special interest group.

Shankar is also the 2006 Direct Marketing Educational Foundation’s Robert B. Clarke Outstanding Educator. The educator award recognizes an academician’s overall achievement in direct and interactive marketing education, and is based on their record of teaching, writing, research and speaking. Past winners have come from such schools as Harvard and NYU.

Ford Chair in Marketing and E-Commerce Rajan Varadarajan was selected to give the honored guest address at the closing banquet dinner of the Marketing Doctoral Students’ Association Conference in August. He also accepted a role in August as associate editor of the Journal of Marketing Research