Faculty
Scholarly Superstar
Bauer Professor Earns University’s Highest Faculty Honor
Wynne Chin, C. T. Bauer Professor of Decision and Information Sciences, was presented with the University of Houston’s highest faculty honor, the Esther Farfel Award, in 2022. The award, established in 1979, recognizes excellence in teaching, research and service.
C. T. Bauer Professor of Decision and Information Sciences Wynne Chin was presented with the University of Houston’s highest faculty honor, the Esther Farfel Award, in 2022. The award recognizes excellence in teaching, research and service, and Chin is just the second College of Business professor to receive the award since it was established in 1979.
“I am grateful to be bestowed this great honor,” Chin said. “The University of Houston has vast talent within its faculty ranks, so it truly is a humbling experience to receive this award.”
In his acceptance speech, Chin noted that he is the second faculty from the business college to receive this award and was grateful to “follow in the footsteps of the previous winner Jack Ivancevich (1988)”. In a full circle moment, Chin said “In fact, I believe it was Jack, as Provost, who approved the UH offer for me to come to Houston as a tenured Associate Professor 25 years ago.”
Chin’s prominence has been recognized in many areas throughout his career, but his approach is always to look for new ways to contribute.
“What does one do if you’ve established excellence in teaching, research, and service in your discipline? The answer is to go beyond,” he said. “So, I’m working on new projects to enhance teaching outside my discipline, research in other fields including Geoscience, Social Work, Education, and Entrepreneurship, and service at a national level to enhance better faculty governance."
Chin’s foundational research was innovating a groundbreaking modeling technique (Partial Least Squares, or PLS) which was adopted by researchers around the world.
He remains the fifth most cited UH professor with 82,000 career citations and is ranked third worldwide in first authored articles published in his discipline's top two journals - MISQ and ISR from 1990 through 2016. But Chin has achieved such prominence while also making outstanding contributions in the areas of teaching, mentoring and faculty governance.
What does one do if you’ve established excellence in teaching, research and service in your discipline? The answer is to go beyond.
Wynne Chin
C. T. Bauer Professor of Decision and Information Sciences
He continues to teach core undergraduate courses such as Supply Chain Management, Business Modeling and Analysis and Introduction to Business Analytics. At the graduate level, he presides over classes such as Business Modeling for Competitive Advantage and leads a doctoral seminar for management information systems students as well as mentoring doctoral students in other departments, including Social Work, Education, and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
He is the only UH faculty member to serve twice as president of Faculty Senate (2008 and 2015) and was elected president of the Texas Council on Faculty Senates in 2019, where he helped establish the National Council of Faculty Senates and was elected treasurer this August.
Chin was named to the KPMG Ph.D. Project’s prestigious “Circle of Compadres” that recognizes faculty who promote and inspire African American, Hispanic American and Native American Information Systems doctoral students as they pursue their degrees and take their place in the academic profession. Those chosen for this award are outstanding mentors to Ph.D. students in Information Systems and related STEM disciplines.
Chin also started a mentoring group to support new Asian and Asian American faculty members. Locally, he founded the Houston Chinese Faculty Association and nationally, he contributes his energies to organizations such as Leadership Education for Asian Pacific and Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education.
Chin continues to raise the bar for faculty excellence by sharing and growing his expertise in surprising and thought-provoking ways. One recent example is working with geoscientists in an effort to improve algorithms that predict deep ocean volcanic ridges. He is working with biology faculty both at UH and in California to increase success for underrepresented groups in Science, Technology, Engineering, and the Math disciplines. At UH, he is focusing on undergraduate success. In the California study, he is focusing on the path from graduate school to professorial success. He just initiated work to rethink entrepreneurial orientation in general and its application in the wine industry in particular. He also recently began advising the Texas A&M University system faculty senates on creating a system wide council.
“It’s good to do things you’re interested in,” Chin told an audience at a talk on work-life balance he delivered at UH a few years back.
He’s given the same talk on an international stage. In it, he manages to summarize his formidable accomplishments while making clear that he doesn’t believe in sacrificing family life or personal interests for academic success. Chin practices martial arts, loves fine wine, playing poker and Hearts, and has an impressive collection of silver age comic books and original comic artwork.
He seems to have always conducted his life and career in a full-swing mode that has richly benefitted himself and others.
“Simply doing, and publishing research is not enough,” he has said, articulating the philosophy that has informed nearly four decades in academia, culminating in the 2022 Farfel Award.
