Professors Agrawal and Jose Named to Poets & Quants 40 Under 40 List

Georgetown Professors Vishal Agrawal and Victor Jose have been named to the Poets & Quants 40 under 40 list. The annual list highlights the 40 best MBA professors under 40 years old, and it includes individuals from across the world. 

Professors are chosen based on both research acumen and teaching skills, and only 40 out of 2,000 professors nominated by their peers, alumni, and students made the list this year. Georgetown McDonough was one of five business schools to have more than one professor on the list. 

Poets & Quants named Agrawal, the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor, to the list for his research and work in creating the new Sustainable Business Certificate offered through Georgetown’s MBA program. 

“He curates classes to be engaging, interesting, and applicable to each of us. He selects thought-provoking case studies and challenges us by integrating our business school studies to complete complex assignments, like calculating the carbon footprint of shipping one ton of FIJI water to Georgetown,” said one nominator.

Agrawal is currently focusing his research on sustainable operations and managerial challenges at the interface of business and the environment. He says it is his “passion for the topic of sustainable business” that helps him stand out as a professor. 

Jose, the William and Karen Sonneborn Associate Professor, focuses his work on decision, risk analysis, and forecasting. Others have taken notice — he has more than 500 Google Scholar Citations of his research. 

“Professor Jose embodies everything I value in a professor – he’s very smart, but doesn’t take himself too seriously,” said one nominator. “He tries to incorporate real-world scenarios into his curriculum instead of just discussing concepts in the abstract, and, most importantly, he actually cares about his students learning.”

Jose currently is working on a project that examines how to incorporate human judgments in machine learning-based forecasting models commonly used in applications such as sports forecasting and bankruptcy prediction. Jose says he stands out as a professor for his “ability to make a technical class accessible to most students.”