Gautam Kaul

Gautam Kaul is a Professor of Finance and holds a master’s in economics from the Delhi School of Economics and PhDs from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. Gautam has published extensively in the top journals in Finance on topics covering a wide spectrum of finance. He was awarded the Senior Faculty Research Award for sustained, exceptional, and continuing contributions to scholarly research in the field of business, and noteworthy contributions to building and maintaining a strong research environment at the Ross School of Business (RSB).

Gautam has taught at the undergraduate, MBA, Global MBA, EMBA and PhD levels and executives all over the world. Gautam has been awarded multiple teaching awards, including the 2009 Victor L. Bernard Leadership in Teaching Award. Gautam has had extensive administrative experience. Among other responsibilities, he has served as Chair of the Finance Department, as Associate Dean of Research & IT, and on the Executive Committee for several years. Gautam has devoted more than a decade to developing a new model of education that is multidisciplinary, research-based, and problem-driven, embracing anytime/anywhere education. The format of this model is hybrid, including content delivery using well-designed asynchronous education programs and high-touch and intense yearlong research- and action-based synchronous learning (both in the digital and traditional/live spaces). He is the founding Managing Director of three programs, created in partnership with graduate students, that reflect this new model of education - the Social Venture Fund (SVF) housed in the Samuel Zell and Robert H. Lurie Institute of Entrepreneurial Studies, the International Investment Fund (IIF) in partnership with the William Davidson Institute (WDI) and the Michigan Climate Venture (MCV) in partnership with the Erb Institute and the School of Environment & Sustainability (SEAS). All three programs have an intense application and interview process and depart from the top-down, sage-on-stage model and follow a PhD-like collaborative model wherein everything is co-managed with teams of elected graduate students, with the explicit goal of providing them ownership and responsibility for their own learning. From 2012-2018, Gautam served as the Special Counsel for Digital Education at the University of Michigan. He helped develop the University’s digital education strategy and offers multiple Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to over three million learners worldwide.