April 23, 2012

Terry Shevlin, the Paul Pigott-PACCAR Professor of Business Administration at the University of Washington Foster School of Business, has been named 2012 Outstanding Accounting Educator by the American Accounting Association (AAA).

“This award—one of the highest academic honors in the field of accounting—is a well-deserved recognition of Terry’s many contributions to accounting research, his editorships and his mentorship of PhD students,” says Jim Jiambalvo, dean of the Foster School of Business.

After earning his PhD at Stanford, Shevlin joined Foster’s Department of Accounting in 1986. He has chaired the department since 2006. He also leads Foster’s Master of Professional Accounting Program in Taxation and previously directed the school’s PhD Program (from 1999 to 2006).

Prolific scholar, mentor

A prolific scholar, Shevlin has published continually in the field’s top journals—often in collaboration with Foster doctoral students—on topics including taxes and business decisions, capital markets-based accounting research, earnings management, employee stock options, research design and statistical significance testing.

“Terry has always been one of our most active, successful scholars, a superstar in his discipline,” says Tom Lee, associate dean for academic and faculty affairs at Foster. “He’s also passionate about working with doctoral students and has an amazing track record of student publication, graduation and job placement.”

Shevlin has been the chair or a committee member for more than 90 percent of Foster School accounting PhD graduates in the last 15 years.

Among his multitude of academic honors, Shevlin is a four-time winner of the Dean’s Faculty Research Award, three-time winner of the American Taxation Association Tax Manuscript Award and a two-time winner of the AAA Competitive Manuscript Award. He was named the American Taxation Association Ray M. Sommerfeld Outstanding Tax Educator in 2005.

A 2009 study of the world’s most-prolific accounting scholars over the past half-century placed Shevlin in the top one percent.

A giant of the discipline

He has served as president of the American Taxation Association (2007-08) and Distinguished Visiting Faculty at the AAA Doctoral Consortium (1993, 1997, 1998, 2006 and 2008).

Shevlin is the current co-editor of Accounting Horizons (2009-present), the premier academic journal appealing to accounting professionals. He has previously served as senior editor of The Accounting Review (2002-05), editor of the Journal of the American Taxation Association (1996-99) and has been an editorial board member of six additional journals in the field of accounting.

According to William McCarthy, a professor of accounting and information systems at Michigan State University and chair of the Outstanding Accounting Educator Award committee, Shevlin’s honor is a kind of global MVP award for accounting faculty. Candidates are nominated by past students—and, in Shevlin’s case, far-flung colleagues in his twin disciplines of financial accounting and tax—and judged along dimensions of educational innovation, teaching excellence, publication record, research guidance and academic service.

“Some people are particularly accomplished at one or two of the criteria,” McCarthy says. “Terry aced them all.”

Foster accounting leads the world

During Shevlin’s tenure, the Foster School’s Department of Accounting has ranked among the world’s elite institutions in several recent measures of teaching effectiveness and research productivity.

A 2009 Brigham Young University study ranked the Foster accounting faculty number one in the world in contributions to financial accounting research published in top journals over the previous 20 years. A 2010 Accounting Horizons report ranked the Foster Accounting PhD Program the second-most productive in the world, based on the number of articles published by graduates in top accounting journals over the past decade. And the Foster School was ranked fifth nationally for accounting in the most recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek rating of MBA programs, and 15th in the latest U.S. News & World Report list.