Dr. Diane M. Lander, former systems engineer, general partner of a business, and experienced academic, has joined the Saint Michael's College department of business administration as an associate professor. She will teach corporate finance, at the beginning and advanced levels. Her areas of interest include real asset valuation techniques and implementation of real options approach to capital budgeting.
"It is very important to me to be at a college where business is taught in tandem with the liberal arts," Dr. Lander said. "I'm very excited to be at Saint Michael's because of the breadth of its teaching, its interdisciplinary approach, its absolute commitment to the liberal arts."
"It's very important to me to be in a business department in a liberal arts setting, because I believe this combination is what will make students successful," she said. Businesses are seeking people who think outside the box; students learn to do that by taking more than just business courses, by getting a broad education in art and literature, history and science, she said.
Students get tremendous value out of infusing business courses with the liberal arts and vice versa-all students need all kinds of financial literacy, and business students are much more successful in their careers and their lives if they have a broad liberal arts education, she said.
Business & Teaching background
Dr. Lander was associate professor and then professor of finance and economics from 2002 to 2008 at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, where she also coordinated the accounting-finance program, and taught graduate and undergraduate courses. She was assistant professor of finance at the University of Southern Maine from 2001 to 2002, and before that, assistant professor of finance at Babson College from 1997 to 2000.
Dr. Lander's business experience includes starting as a medical technologist, moving into systems engineering, and systems programming, and then becoming general partner and owner of Lander-Marsh Enterprise in Frisco, Texas.
Academic credentials
Dr. Lander earned a doctorate in finance from the University of Kansas in 1997, an MBA degree in finance from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas in 1991, and her bachelor's degree in genetics, with highest honors, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, from the University of California, Davis, in 1971.
Dr. Lander is widely published (15 articles) and has made numerous professional presentations. Some of her publications include "Introducing Students to the Real Option Approach to Capital Budgeting" in Journal of the Academy of Business Education (2007); "Strategic Implications of Valuation: Evidence from Valuing Growth Options" in Advances in Strategic Management (2007); "Managing Risk and Uncertainty in Complex Capital Projects" in Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance (2004); "Business Strategy and Real Options in the Context of Large Engineering Projects" in Journal of Global Competitiveness and more. She is a reviewer and on the editorial boards of a number of journals of finance, economics and business education, and has made some 22 professional presentations.
At this time, Dr. Lander is a resident of Strafford, N.H.
Saint Michael's College, founded in 1904 by the Society of St. Edmund and headed by President John J. Neuhauser, is identified by the Princeton Review as one of the nation's Best 368 Colleges. A liberal arts, residential, Catholic college, Saint Michael's is located just outside of Burlington, Vermont, one of America's top college towns and less than two hours from Montreal. As one of only 270 institutions nationwide with a prestigious Phi Beta Kappa chapter on campus, Saint Michael's has 2,000 full-time undergraduate students, some 500 graduate students and 200 international students. In recent years Saint Michael's students and professors have received Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Science Foundation and other grants, and Saint Michael's professors have been named Vermont Professor of the Year in four of the last eight years. The college is currently listed as one of the nation's Best Liberal Arts Colleges in the 2008 U.S. News & World Report rankings.