Rutgers' School of Management and Labor Relations Announces The 2010-2011 J. Robert Beyster Fellowships to Study Employee Ownership

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., June 13, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) has announced the recipients of the 2011-2012 J. Robert Beyster Fellowships to support scholars in the field of employee ownership.

The annual fellowship program was established with a major gift from J. Robert Beyster and Mary Ann Beyster of La Jolla, Calif., with a grant from the Foundation for Enterprise Development in 2008.  This is the third year of the fellowship program. The fellowships honor Beyster's many accomplishments in the area of employee stock ownership, profit sharing and broad-based stock options.

The competitive fellowships identify the most distinguished young scholars around the country and support their scholarly work. "SMLR has developed the leading interdisciplinary research program in the world on issues of shared capitalism and the role of the corporation in society," said Dean David Finegold. "The fellowship program allows Rutgers to bring together the best talent in the nation with its established researchers in order to make significant progress in understanding these important issues."

The new Beyster Fellows are:

• Ilona Babenko, the J. Robert Beyster Fellow and Beyster Visiting Assistant Professor, who is researching the corporate benefits associated with broad-based employee stock option programs and employee stock purchase plans.  She is an assistant professor of finance at the Arizona State University Carey School of Business with a doctorate in economics from the University of California at Berkeley.
• Daphne Berry, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, who is looking at the quality of care, participatory decision- making, and worker ownership in the home health aide industry.  She is a Ph.D. candidate in management and organization studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Isenberg School of Management.
• Jed DeVaro, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, who is exploring incentive compensation, worker participation, the delegation of worker authority, and broad-based stock options. He is the Wang Family Professor in management and economics at the California State University at East Bay College of Business and Economics. He has a doctorate in economics from Stanford University.
• Yael  Hochberg, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, who is analyzing whether stock options granted to the rank and file have an incentive effect for those workers. She is an assistant professor of finance at the Northwestern University Kellog School of Management with a doctorate in finance from Stanford University.
• Laura Lindsey, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, who is studying how firms that grant options broadly to non- executive employees contribute to firm value. She is an assistant professor of finance at the Arizona State University Carey School of Business with a doctorate in economics from Stanford University.
• David Madland, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, who is conducting a review of state and federal policies on broad-based employee ownership and profit sharing.  He is Director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress with a doctorate in government from Georgetown University.
• Lily Song, a J. Robert  Beyster Fellow, who is examining democratic wealth generation in emerging green sectors such as worker-owned companies and other formats that provide access to tangible gains for working-poor families and other marginalized populations. She is a doctoral candidate in urban studies and planning at MIT.

Dr. Beyster founded Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) in 1969 and is its former chair and CEO. Under his leadership, SAIC grew to over $7 billion in annual revenues and more than 40,000 workers, becoming the largest employee-owned research and technology company in the U.S. Broad-based ownership and profit-sharing were key to enabling the firm's entrepreneurial culture and its employee motivation to work on nationally important problems.

Beyster then founded the Foundation for Enterprise Development in 1986. His daughter, Mary Ann Beyster, is president of the foundation, which funds interdisciplinary research and development of business school, entrepreneurship and engineering curricula on broad-based employee ownership.

Beyster received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in engineering and physics from the University of Michigan. He began his career in the early 1950s as a senior scientist at Westinghouse. He then worked as a physicist at Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory. He joined General Atomic in 1957 as chair of the Accelerator Physics Department. He has written or co-authored approximately 60 books, publications and reports.

The fellows meet twice a year in order to present academic papers, receive feedback from each other, and develop collaborations.  The Foundation for Enterprise Development has sponsored the summer Beyster Fellowship Symposium in LaJolla, California for the past three years.  

Two Rutgers researchers who are experts on these topics serve as faculty mentors, Professor Douglas L. Kruse, an economist, and Joseph R. Blasi, a sociologist,  the first J. Robert Beyster Professor at SMLR, who coordinates  the fellowship program.  Professor Richard Freeman, the Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University, also serves as a faculty mentor.

For information on the current and past Beyster Fellows, see: http://smlr.rutgers.edu/beyster-fellows

SOURCE Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations