Two Binghamton University School of Management faculty make list of best business professors

Two Binghamton University School of Management (SOM) faculty members have been ranked among the best business professors in the country.

Saeideh Mirghorbani, assistant professor of business analytics and operations, and Srikanth Parameswaran, assistant professor of management information systems (MIS), were featured on the Poets & Quants list of the “Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professors Of 2021.”

Honorees are selected from nominations received from students, alumni and colleagues. According to Poets & Quants, an online publication for business education news, nearly 1,200 nominations were submitted for this year’s list. Nominees are evaluated on research and teaching accolades.

Of the 39 schools represented, SOM was one of 11 to have multiple faculty members featured on the list. Sara Ryoo, a former SOM faculty member now at Baruch College, also made the list after being nominated for her time at Binghamton University.

Mirghorbani, who came to Binghamton in 2018, specializes in areas such as healthcare systems and machine learning. She said she knew she wanted to become a business school professor when she herself was a college student.

“I have always enjoyed teaching, and I knew I would eventually be a teacher,” she said in an interview conducted for the Poets & Quants list. “So, when I started my PhD studies, I focused on skills required to succeed on this path.”

Mirghorbani said she tries to simplify complicated business concepts for her students through day-to-day examples.

“This way, an intangible idea turns into a tangible one and, of course, memorable,” she said. “I have realized that students like this experience better than the traditional classroom experience, and more often get involved in classroom activities.”

Parameswaran, who also arrived in Binghamton in 2018, researches areas such as IT innovation, user-generated and web content mining, and technology-mediated health outcomes. He said it was working on research that inspired him to become a business professor.

“Research is one of the best things one can ever do. It is cool that professors do that for a living,” he said.

Parameswaran said what he enjoys most about teaching business students is watching them apply skills they learned in his class.

“My day is made when a student writes to me saying that they built something new, like a website or app, or solved critical issues at their workplace based on what they learned in my class,” he said.

This isn’t the first time SOM has been featured on this list. Surinder Kahai, associate professor of MIS, was featured on the 2020 list after receiving numerous nominations from students and alumni.

You can see the full list at this link.