SOM presents awards for researchers in economics and business

On June 4,  SOM,  the research institute and graduate school  of the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Groningen, presented the SOM awards 2009.

The winners are:

• Best Research Master Graduate 2009 : Jochen Reiner
• Best PhD thesis 2009:  Tigran Poghosyan
• Outstanding Junior Researcher: Frank Walter
• Outstanding Researcher: Jakob de Haan

Jochen Reiner graduated as Research Master student in de marketing profile  in 2009 and is currently a PhD student at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany.
He otbained excellent grades, with an average well above 8.0 and wrote his master thesis “Assessing Differences in Marketing Department’s Influence across countries – How much do Firm Characteristics matter?”, under the supervision of Prof. Peter Verhoef and Prof. Peter Leeflang.

On September 10, 2009  Tigran Poghosyan defended his thesis  “Essays on foreign ownership in transition banking”.  He was supervised by Prof. Jakob de Haan,  Prof. Elmer Sterken, and Dr.  Michael Koetter.
To the opinion of the jury the quality of  his thesis is very good. It has also been taken into account that he has finished his  dissertation in about three years and that two chapters already have been published in the Journal of Banking & Finance (that has a very good status on the SOM journals list).
Now he is working as an Economist for the  International Monetary Fund.

Frank Walter obtained his PhD degree in 2008, Summa Cum Laude, at the University of St. Gallen, Switserland. In the short period since his defense he has been able to develop an interesting line of research on among others leadership, within the Research Institute HRM&OB and to  publish four publications in top journals.

Jakob de Haan has numerous publications in top and very good journals en books published by international top publishers. He is a highly cited researcher with a so-called  H-index of 11 and editor of the European Journal of Political Economy. During his career he has supervised 20 PhD dissertations, three of which were defended in 2009. He was director of the Research School SOM  for more than 10 years.
Currently he is Head of Research of De Nederlandsche Bank and professor of political economy at FEB.