USC Marshall School of Business

Maria Ogneva, who graduated from USC Marshall’s Ph.D. program in 2008 and joined the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has been named one of the world’s top 40 business professors under the age of 40 by website Poets & Quants.com The article was posted on Fortune.com and CNN.com—sites with which Poets & Quants.com shares content.

Compiled from nominations by business school officials, students and alumni, the Poets & Quants top 40 list celebrates professors who "draw students into often esoteric subjects, inspire deeper thinking and engaged discussion, assisting in the discovery of new and powerful ideas."

Ogneva, 31, has distinguished herself in teaching and research at Stanford. The Poets & Quants article cited those qualities among the reasons Ogneva made the list of "rising stars in business academia."

Ogneva received the 2010 Sloan Teaching Excellence Award at Stanford. She taught financial accounting to 57 Sloan Fellows — mid-career professionals and managers — in Stanford’s Sloan Master's Program, earning high praise from her students. Poets & Quants also cited Ogneva’s current research, which investigates the effect of financial reporting quality on the cost of equity financing, and said that her work has also yielded an innovative accounting approach to estimating firms’ cost of capital, which incidentally was awarded the Best Paper Award at the Review of Accounting Studies, a premier academic journal.

While at Marshall, Ogneva earned two doctoral fellowships and two awards: the Haskell and White Corporate Governance Conference Best Paper Award and the Mary Pickford Foundation Doctoral Teaching Award. More importantly, Ogneva published several articles in premier academic journals prior to graduation, and developed an influential dissertation that is close to being accepted for publication at a top journal.

"Maria embodies the strength of Marshall’s doctoral program," said K.R. Subramanyam, KPMG Foundation professor of accounting and director of the Ph.D. program at Marshall. "Our goal is to educate individuals who will become thought leaders in the academic world," said Subramanyam.