Expand the Excellence of Chicago Booth’s Faculty

Steven Neil Kaplan:
I've been at Booth since 1988. This was the best place in the country for corporate finance. I was very interested in how do you make companies run better, so I started doing research on venture capital and top executive talent. Having impact on policy or practice is awesome, but what's really important is the impact on the students and what they do.

At Booth, we help students want to be entrepreneurs or investors or executives. I still try to do research that is practical, giving the student some tools that will help make them more successful.

The New Venture Challenge is I think the best business accelerator program in the country. It's very tough, but it's very constructive.

The progress and the learning is immense. We've had some big successes like Grubhub, Simple Mills, Tovala. The only good thing about getting older is your former students get more successful.

The Booth students are special because they come here and they actually want to learn something. They get up in the morning and it's like, I can't wait to get to work.

Erik Hurst:
I grew up, I would say, lower middle class. My father was a manufacturer. My mom had less than a high school education. Then automation came and affected their lives. So the labor market is something I just grew up thinking about. I care about the middle class getting eroded and how we as scientists could help policymakers make that middle class stronger. That's what keeps me going.

For University of Chicago, economics is kind of at the forefront of the world. I teach a macroeconomics class, and so I always like to tell my students, I'm preparing them not for their first job, but for their last job. As you move up the chain of command in your industry, you have more and more access to influencing decisions. New technologies come in, replace old technologies in society advances. We always want to be teaching how to think as opposed to what to think.

It's going to be even more important as we come forward with these new technologies that are coming along, like AI today. It's important for us as scientists to realize that our work is incremental, that each day we're trying to add a little brick in the wall. We spend a lot of our time here at great institutions like the University of Chicago creating cutting-edge research. We're just trying to build walls of knowledge to leave to future generations.