The Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration has attracted stellar new faculty who bring research expertise, a keen interest in the hospitality industry, and a deep appreciation for the school’s culture to the community.

From its earliest days as a program within the department of Home Economics in Cornell’s New York State College of Agriculture, the Nolan Hotel School has been dedicated to preparing leaders equipped to move the hospitality industry forward. Its multipronged approach includes providing students with a rigorous, industry-specific business curriculum and hands-on learning experiences, connecting both students and faculty to leaders in the hospitality industry, and creating a tightly knit Hotelie community infused with a culture that places a high value on service to others.

The Nolan Hotel School has made a point of building a faculty who cultivate strong ties with hospitality industry leaders, who stay closely tuned in to the industry’s challenges, and who, as thought leaders, help to lead the industry forward. Faculty members’ academic excellence enables them to conduct both rigorous and relevant research that defines the future of the hospitality industry.

“Faculty are at the heart and soul of our school,” said Kate Walsh, dean of the Nolan Hotel School. “Their passion for teaching, their thought leadership, and their deep engagement with our alumni and industry leaders ensure that our school is not only the hub of our industry, but continues to lead the way as the premier worldwide school for hospitality education.”

The newest tenure-track faculty members conduct research on real estate, finance, accounting, labor and the gig economy, human resources, industrial engineering and operations, organizational behavior, and data-driven decision-making. They have come from doctoral programs at Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, MIT, Arizona State, Berkeley, and the London School of Economics, and they are trailblazers in their fields.

One, Ruihao Zhu, assistant professor of operations, technology, and information management, trained at MIT in statistics and did internships at Amazon Supply Chain Optimization Technologies and Google Research. His research centers on “developing novel algorithms for machine learning and sequential decision making to address fundamental and practical challenges in revenue management, supply chain, and healthcare.”

“We hire the best of the best, and then we provide them with the hospitality context and connections to drive their research agendas, shape their expertise, and help them grow into industry-focused thought leaders and educators,” said Walsh.

Tashlin Lakhani and Asís Martínez-Jerez, who joined the faculty in 2020, illustrate well this commitment to learning and serving the hospitality industry.

What Matters to Tashlin Lakhani

Tashlin Lakhani has learned a great deal from working both sides of the street—not in the figurative sense, but literally. In fact, it changed the course of her research, first as a graduate student, and now as an assistant professor of management and organizations.

For starters, it’s a short walk across Statler Drive from her graduate alma mater, the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, to her academic home, the Nolan Hotel School. She has crisscrossed that narrow divide many times.

And then, there are the two hotels she studied in graduate school, one across the street from the other, both flying the same corporate flag, but one franchised and one company-operated. The summer she spent comparing them was a career-changer.

Ownership Matters

It was Lakhani’s faculty advisors in the ILR School who pointed her in the direction of the Nolan Hotel School. “Originally, I wanted to study international hotel chains and look at their HR practices,” which is what she explained to her committee when she defended her dissertation proposal. She thought she might start by collecting and analyzing some data. “My committee said to me, ‘Look, if you want to study hotels, then you need to understand them, which means you need to spend a summer hanging out in hotels.’” So she did. She negotiated access to two hotels that turned out to be directly across the street from each other.

“I didn’t know that one was franchised and one was company-managed, and I also didn’t think it would make that big of a difference,” she said. “But surprisingly, it did. I spent a lot of time in these hotels talking to managers, observing interactions, observing employees, talking to employees—and the one thing that became clear was that it mattered who owned the hotel. That affected how each hotel was managed; it affected the different HR practices being used in each hotel.

“That was sort of a light bulb moment for me,” said Lakhani. “That ended up switching the entire course of my career because there had been so little done on the effect of franchising and ownership structures on HR,” she said.

Lakhani was struck by how much context matters, understanding your industry matters, and ownership matters. “It was by spending time in the industry, understanding the structure of the industry and how the hotels operated, that I realized this was an exciting stream of research.”

Relationships Matter

Lakhani’s research got an important boost from the relationships between ILR and the Nolan Hotel School. “I spent a ton of time at the Nolan School during graduate school, especially at industry roundtables with the centers and institutes,” she said. Professor Rohit Verma, who was then the director of the Center for Hospitality Research, joined her dissertation committee. “He helped guide me and introduced me to a lot of industry folks. I was able to present some of my early research at CHR board meetings to get some feedback there. Then I pounded the pavement trying to get access to data and convince board members and industry roundtable participants to give me access to their organizations to conduct a survey.”

At the time, CIHLER—the Center for Innovative Hospitality Labor and Employment Relations—was in the early stages of formation as a joint undertaking of the two schools. Harry Katz, who was then the dean of ILR, invited Lakhani to meet with a hospitality industry leader who had an interest in CIHLER. He wanted to know more about the extent of the collaboration between the schools, and Katz asked Lakhani to talk to him about her interactions with the Nolan Hotel School. “So I got to meet this individual who ended up being my lifeline,” she said. “I presented some of my research; he found it extremely exciting, and he said something to the effect of, ‘Your theory is correct. I have data to prove it.’”

Feeling “gutsy,” she asked him, “‘Well, do you want to share that data with me?’ and he said, ‘Sure!’” He connected her with a large hotel company, where she was given permission to conduct the survey she needed for her dissertation; it was the first of its kind to be done within the company. “I was able to look at HR practices across franchised and company operations within the same chain and get data from corporate on things like customer satisfaction scores. And then I separately collected data on TripAdvisor scores and merged the data together to look at whether there truly were differences statistically between company-owned and franchised hotels in terms of their HR investments and organizational outcomes.”

She was on her way.

Give-and-Take Matters

An enthusiastic participant in CIHLER’s HR in Hospitality Conference, Lakhani chaired several sessions at the 2022 meeting, including one on human resource management in franchises. “We had some interesting conversations there about issues that brands are facing and how they can assist franchisees without becoming legally liable for their franchisees’ employees. The panel was an opportunity for me to share some of my research with industry, but then also to gain insight and take back important viewpoints that I can work into my research.”

Lakhani values the opportunity to have a practical impact that the Nolan School offers. “Academics become academics to look at theoretically interesting questions,” she said. “When we’re business scholars, we’re trying to impact organizations and their practices. We don’t always succeed at that, but at the Nolan School there is an opportunity to connect with industry and do just that.”

Commitment Matters

The other opportunity to have an impact, of course, is in the classroom. Lakhani describes herself as a highly interactive teacher who encourages her students to debate the issues that they’re learning about in class. “Our students truly come here with a commitment to the industry, wanting to advance the industry, wanting to be future leaders of the industry. They are a highly engaged group, and it’s inspiring to see that and to be a part of it. “There’s something unique about the way that the Nolan School fosters relationships and connections to industry,” Lakhani added. “You know that when our students graduate, you’re going to see them come back for HEC; you’re going to see them at industry roundtables; you’re going to see them come back to our classrooms. They are really forever connected.”

Studying the Art and Science of Being a Hotelie

Asís Martínez-Jerez is an unusual student for an undergraduate hospitality operations class. He is an associate professor of accounting with an MBA and master’s and doctoral degrees in business economics from Harvard, plus two earlier master’s degrees in business and law from the Universidad Pontificia Comillas, a Jesuit school in Madrid. He joined the Nolan Hotel School faculty in 2020 after 20 years on the faculties at Harvard Business School and the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. He also has early experience in international corporate consulting and recent experience on boards of directors. He has, however, limited background in hospitality.

This professor actually takes undergraduate courses himself “to get knowledge of operations, of cooking, and so on and, more importantly, capturing the essence of the school,” he said. “This is a school that is very strong in culture and identity, and the culture is the students. If you want to understand the culture of the school, you cannot be in a cloister with the faculty. You have to be with the students.”

With the same goal, Martínez-Jerez makes a point of going when his students have an Establishment night for their Restaurant Management class. And he keeps a pile of Establishment menus signed by students on a shelf in his Statler Hall office. “I think I’m the professor who has gone to the most Establishment nights this year,” he said. “I order the special menu if I can because that’s what the students design. It’s an experience that’s priceless.”

Learning From the Industry

For deep knowledge of the hospitality industry writ large, Martínez-Jerez is building relationships with alumni and other industry leaders. He is working on a research project with major hotel brands, and he’s in discussions on a project with a luxury cruise line. He met one of these contacts by attending the weekly faculty coffees with speakers in the Dean’s Distinguished Lecture Series. Before attending the Cornell Hospitality Icon and Innovator Awards gala in June, he studied the guest list to see who he most wanted to meet there. He had an interesting conversation with a food-services company CEO, and it may result in another research project. “Who knows?” he said. “At least we talk, he picks up the phone. These people are busy, but they understand what we’re here for.

“The challenge is to produce rigorous scholarly research and retain our managerial relevance,” notes Martínez-Jerez. “We have to be doing research that enables managers to do a better job in providing hospitality to the world.”

Finding Power in Empowered Employees

A managerial accountant with a focus on strategy implementation, Martínez-Jerez is having no trouble identifying hospitality-focused research projects. “It’s all performance measurement, design of organizations for excellence—so, understanding people, how you motivate people, what information you give to people.”

Martínez-Jerez studies effects of traditional, hierarchical models on motivating younger talent. “The power of coercion that hierarchy relies on has diminished,” he said. “Organizations that work that way attract a type of people who don’t care and don’t pay attention to authority. Then we have the service failures that we see.

“On the other hand,” he noted, “a lot of young people want to have an impact. They are looking at the organizations that allow them to grow. It’s sort of paradoxical because in making the organization serve the employees, the employees end up serving the greater good of the organization.

“It’s very important how you design your organization,” Martínez-Jerez noted, “especially with so much technological change and super-savvy customers who learn everything about you before you have a chance to interact with them. You have to be very agile, which means you have to give a lot of power to your employees. And if you have to give a lot of power to your employees, what you’re also giving them is the chance to drop the ball and damage your company. How you make those things work; how you set your values, your culture; how you set your incentives, your rewards—those are the kinds of questions I look at.”

In identifying industry opportunities post-pandemic, he said, “I think we need to care deeply about the industry, but we also have to recognize the things that have not been done well in the past. I think the labor shortage that is currently punishing the industry is in part due to the way that they have treated employees. And they have recognized it, so now they are trying to discover how, instead of using employees as tools to serve the mission of serving guests, they can create an environment that allows employees to grow and become relevant—so they can serve their guests. We are in that transition, and I think we need to study that, with a focus on the behavior of people, the psychology of economics behavior.”

Caring, Culture, and Relevance

What attracts a senior academic with little background in hospitality to the Nolan Hotel School? In the case of Martínez-Jerez, it’s the school’s deep focus on industry engagement and impact—doing work that matters. “I like the three legs of my profession. It’s a privileged profession because you’re working all the time with smart people—students and faculty; you need to reinvent yourself every day. You cannot teach what you taught yesterday and not do research, so it’s an intellectual challenge, and you’re touching the hearts and the lives of young people.

“I love the hotel school for three things: caring about the research, and now more so—that was a key factor in my decision to come here; caring about teaching—you cannot just create knowledge; you have to disseminate knowledge; and caring about engagement with the industry—it is important that the knowledge we develop be relevant and applicable."

“The college provides a freer research environment. I am part of an accounting group that is top-notch in the country, but I wouldn’t have come here if the Nolan Hotel School didn’t exist. I love this school, and I want to make it a better place.”

An Ethos that Benefits All

It’s in the Nolan Hotel School’s DNA to cultivate a relationship-driven model between faculty, alumni, and industry, as Lakhani and Martínez-Jerez do; in fact, it’s part of the school’s premier value proposition. Every year, hundreds of alumni come to campus to meet with faculty and students; hundreds more connect virtually and provide their mentorship and support in every way possible. And they gladly do it because someone did it for them when they were students. It’s a virtuous cycle.

New faculty are excited to join the school because they understand that nowhere else can they have this kind of industry access and support to drive forward their research and create a truly impactful classroom experience. These smart, talented faculty are inspired to study critical issues, to teach Ivy League students who understand the value and virtue of taking care of others, and to have their life’s work make a difference. They have found all this in their Hotelie home.

The Nolan Hotel School’s value proposition is deeply embedded in its rich history and culture; all who participate in the life of the school, including faculty, students, alumni, and other hospitality industry leaders, benefit from its relationship-driven educational model. The school’s worldwide global brand stands alone.

“As we begin our second century, with the engagement and support of our alumni, our world-class faculty will continue to shape our industry’s future,” said Walsh. “And with their deep caring and expertise, with both hearts and minds, they will prepare our next generation of industry leaders.”