The David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah recently appointed Jen Brown as the new chair of the Department of Entrepreneurship & Strategy. She began her three-year term on July 1 and looks forward to leading the department ranked among the top 5 in the nation for entrepreneurship education.

“I hope to continue the great work of the previous chairs and continue to push the department forward,” said Brown, the H. Brent Beesley Professor of Entrepreneurship & Strategy. “I want to be a strong advocate for our department’s growth. We have real opportunities to hire some of the top-ranked strategy scholars and continue to build our reputation as one of the premier strategy departments in the country.”

She plans to encourage the department to build an academic program focused on value creation for students in Utah. She also wants to foster the department’s many centers, institutes, and initiatives, while helping the department’s junior faculty find success in research and teaching.

Brown has been a professor at the Eccles School since 2017. Before that, she taught at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley, a master of science from the University of Guelph, and a bachelor of science from the University of Manitoba.

Her research interests include examining competitors’ incentives and strategies in tournaments and job seekers’ behavior during the Great Recession. She is currently working on projects studying the consequences of consumer protection laws, how choices in higher education vary with students’ gender, how individuals gather information when making risky decisions, and how firms’ investment in safety varies with firm type.

Brown teaches courses including managerial economics and competitive strategy at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

She replaces the previous chair, Matthew Higgins, who served in this role from July 2020 through June 2023.

“The previous chairs, along with the faculty, built an outstanding department,” Brown said. “They hired a remarkable set of both junior and senior professors, collaborated with new and established centers to build and grow academic programs, and maintained strong relationships with other departments and the dean’s office. Although the chair job is a daunting one in a department the size of ours, I’m very grateful to be making this transition in such a well-functioning organization.”

One of Brown’s highest priorities will be to elevate the department’s reputation as a thought leader.

“Given our reputation as a premier strategy department, we are well positioned to bring some of the world’s best strategy thinkers into our academic community,” she said. “Our intellectual capital is also a foundation for building innovative academic programming that creates value for students at the U.”

When Brown is not working, she enjoys playing golf at courses around the Salt Lake Valley.

Learn more about the Department of Entrepreneurship & Strategy at Eccles.Utah.edu/ENTP.

About the David Eccles School of Business

The Eccles School is synonymous with “doing.” The Eccles experience provides a world-class business education with a unique, entrepreneurial focus on real-world scenarios where students put what they learn into practice long before graduation. Founded in 1917 and educating more than 6,000 students annually, the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business offers nine undergraduate majors, four MBAs, eight other graduate programs, a Ph.D. in five areas and executive education curricula. The school is also home to more than 20 institutes, centers and initiatives, which deliver academic research and support an ecosystem of entrepreneurship and innovation. For more information, visit Eccles.Utah.edu or call 801-581-7676.