Walton College Accounting Professor Receives ACE Fellowship

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Carolyn M. Callahan, a professor of accounting at the University of Arkansas, has been awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Education.

Callahan, holder of the Doris M. Cook Chair in Accounting in the Sam M. Walton College of Business, will spend the 2005-2006 academic year on the University of Rhode Island, Kingston campus. Bob Smith, the University of Arkansas vice chancellor for academic affairs and provost, serves as Callahan’s sponsor for the fellowship. University of Rhode Island President Robert Carothers will be her administrative mentor.

"American Council of Education (ACE) Fellowships are highly prized among U.S. higher education professionals,” said Smith. “Professor Callahan is a well deserving recipient of the ACE Fellowship, which should provide her notable administrative development opportunities with one of the best ACE Fellowship mentors in the country — University of Rhode Island President Robert Carothers."  Carothers recently received the first Council of Fellows Mentor's Award at the 87th Annual Meeting of the American Council on Education in February 2005.

Callahan said: “I am grateful to the University of Arkansas and feel honored to be named an ACE Fellow. Forty college and university senior faculty and administrators have been named members of the 2005-06 class of ACE Fellows. This will be a wonderful opportunity to network nationally across disciplines, further develop administrative skills and to forge ahead on an ongoing research agenda.”

The American Council of Education Fellowship Program is the nation’s premier higher education leadership development program and has prepared senior leaders to serve American colleges and universities. ACE Fellows spend a year on another campus, working directly with presidents and other senior leaders to observe how they address strategic planning, resource allocation, development, policy, and other issues and challenges. Fellows also participate in three week-long national seminars, visit other campuses, and attend national as well as international conferences. The program is highly competitive and individuals are selected on the basis of academic credentials and demonstrated national leadership ability. Fellows must be nominated by the chancellor and provost of their home institution.

 Callahan joined the Walton College in January 2001. She came from the University of Notre Dame where she was formerly the KPMG Research Faculty Fellow. Callahan received her doctoral degree in accountancy and finance from Michigan State University, her Master of Science in accountancy from Bowling Green State University and her Bachelor of  Science in accounting from Ohio Northern University. She began her academic career at the University of Massachusetts and was promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure.

Callahan currently serves as vice president of the American Accounting Association (AAA). Founded in 1916 as the American Association of University Instructors in Accounting, the AAA is a voluntary national organization of people interested in accounting education and research. She was previously the chair of the AAA’s 1999 New Faculty Consortium; served on the 1999 Globalization Initiation Committee, which planned the first international conference sponsored by AAA and Taiwan; and served as co-chair of the program committee for the 2000 Globalization Conference sponsored by the AAA and the British Accounting Association held in Oxford, England.

In giving back to the African-American community and her profession, Callahan was a founding member of The PhD Project for minority doctoral students in accounting as well as finance. She spent five years as the initial accounting program chair and developed the innovative program model still used today that links minority doctoral students’ annual meeting to their future academic professional meeting exposing them early to the best scholars in their field. In August 2000, she was awarded the organization’s highest award for outstanding leadership, commitment and service to the accounting academic profession. Recently, she was honored with the American Association of Higher Education’s 2003 Harold Delaney Exemplary Educational Leadership Award.

Callahan’s research interests include capital market frictions, corporate information signals and analytical pricing models. Her research addresses the quality of information produced by a firm and financing costs in the capital markets. This research is used by investors to make better investment decisions and by corporate managers to minimize their cost of raising equity capital.

In addition to receiving national competitive research grants, Callahan has been published in numerous top tier academic journals such as The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, and the Journal of Accounting Research among others. She has served as a member of the editorial review boards of The Accounting Review and Accounting Horizons.   She was recently appointed to an international review board for the Journal of International Financial Management and Accounting associated with the Research Conference for Accounting Educators to be held jointly with the French Accounting Association in Bordeaux, France in September 2005.

While Callahan’s fellowship year will be demanding, in the upcoming academic year she will continue to support accounting doctoral students in their job placement process and the completion of their degrees. Callahan served as director of the accounting doctoral program in the Walton College for three years.