If you happen to be in Clayton’s Shaw Park at 6 a.m., chances are you will run into Todd Milbourn, Ph.D. The Olin Business School finance professor and fellow members of the Shark Fitness Boot Camp exercise class are there, rain or shine.
“It involves running, weightlifting, core work and hundreds of push-ups on the hill,” Milbourn says. “I have been taking the class for nearly five years now, and it has put me in the best shape I’ve been in since my college track days. I am absolutely addicted to it — the results, the participants and the competitive outlet it provides.”
At 6 feet 2 inches, Milbourn is a tall, lean and fit 40-year-old who could easily be mistaken for a graduate student. He’s usually clad in a T-shirt and jeans that only add to his youthful, easygoing demeanor. Milbourn is not your typical finance professor, according to Radha Gopalan, Ph.D., an Olin colleague.
“We researchers can be a dour bunch, wanting to be left alone most of the time,” says Gopalan, assistant professor of finance. “Among us, Todd is the one who keeps his door always open, welcomes everyone with a smile and is always eager to listen and help.”
Milbourn grew up in Batavia, Ill., when it still was a small town and not the sprawling western suburb of Chicago it is today.
“I grew up in a very traditional, blue-collar home,” Milbourn says. “My mother was a homemaker; my father was in construction. My grandfather was in business but had begun as a minister and later managed retirement communities.”
In addition to being a born-and-bred fan of the Chicago Cubs, Bulls and Bears, Milbourn liked playing competitive sports. He wanted to play basketball in college but admits with self-deprecating humor: “I wasn’t tall enough, and I couldn’t shoot. But I had decent springs.” His high-jump record of 6 foot 5 inches in high school propelled him to a four-year track and field career at college.
Stats and numbers also kept Milbourn busy in the classroom. He graduated from high school with a passion for math and several college credits already under his belt. Unsure of what he wanted to major in when he entered Augustana College, a small liberal arts school in northwest Illinois, Milbourn says he discovered economics, finance and business next door to the math department and relished the challenge of each new course.
Economic reality hit hard when Milbourn graduated from college in 1991. The junk bond crisis had sent the economy into a tailspin — similar to the economic climate of the past year. It was a tough job market.
“One of my economics professors,” Milbourn says, “suggested I look into Ph.D. programs in finance. It was the best advice I ever got.”
A few months later, the high-jumper from the Land of Lincoln moved to Hoosier territory and became a graduate student at Indiana University Bloomington.
‘Country mouse goes to the city’
During graduate school, Milbourn married his college sweetheart, Elizabeth. The couple had a 1-year-old baby boy when Milbourn got his first job offer at the London Business School.
“Going from five years in Bloomington, Ind., to London is the epitome of country mouse goes to the city,” says Milbourn with a laugh. “It forced us to grow up very quickly. We were very Midwestern, small-town people. It definitely expanded our horizons and brought us together as a couple.”
After three years of teaching in London, Milbourn accepted a yearlong visiting position at the University of Chicago business school. It was a move that pleased the grandparents in Illinois who were eager to get acquainted with a granddaughter who was born in England and her big brother.
For the young professor, the intellectual climate and research opportunities at the University of Chicago opened doors to new colleagues, research and opportunities — one of them being a visit to give a seminar at WUSTL, which led to a job offer. The Milbourns, now with three children in tow, packed up and moved to St. Louis. That was almost 10 years ago.
Teaching finance for all
If you are studying finance at WUSTL, you can’t graduate without taking a course from Todd Milbourn.
“I’m one of the few professors who teaches in nearly every program we have,” Milbourn says. “I see every finance major in the BSBA undergrad program. I teach the core finance course to every full-time MBA student and an equivalent intro course for the Executive MBAs in St. Louis and Shanghai. I see every constituency we have.”
Milbourn says he and his students benefit from his multilevel teaching. He calls it the “spillover effect.”
“When I’m with the Executive MBA students, they will talk about examples of what they are doing,” Milbourn says. “They’ll say, ‘We were doing this deal …’ Then, when I’m back in the undergrad class, I’ll say, I was just talking to these execs from Emerson last week, and they were evaluating an acquisition of a company, and here are some of the issues they were dealing with.
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Todd Milbourn |
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Children: Two boys and a girl: MJ, 14; Hannah, 12; and Nate, 9 Hobbies: Coaching his daughter’s basketball team and cheering “relentlessly for my kids in their sporting activities,” he says Reading for pleasure: Military fiction. George MacDonald Fraser and W.E.B. Griffin are two of his favorite authors in this genre. Giving back: Helped found a not-for-profit organization called the St. Louis Military Officers Support Foundation, which provides training and support for U.S. military officers who are preparing for active duty or on leave between deployments. Milbourn says, “Having not served in our nation’s military, I feel that this is one way that I can give back to our great country.” |
“Not only do such interchanges allow me to bring back best practices to the full-time programs, but it really makes the material come alive,” Milbourn says. “So there is definitely a spillover between the programs.”
Not only does Milbourn like to teach, but he gets rave reviews from colleagues and students alike. He is a seven-time recipient of the Reid Award for Teaching Excellence (based on student votes), and he held the Marcile and James Reid Chair in recognition of excellence in teaching by a junior faculty member in 2002-03.
“Todd is one of the business school’s all-star professors,” says Lubomir Litov, Ph.D., assistant professor of finance. “I have co-taught with Todd for three years now in the BSBA program. He is really great to work with — easygoing, always willing to help and incredibly helpful to junior faculty. Students, on the other hand, love to talk to him, too, for matters related to class and career choice.”
In addition to teaching, Milbourn has been coordinator of Olin’s finance area since 2005. As academic director of the new M.S. in Finance program from 2005-08, Milbourn was responsible for the design, development and implementation of the one-year, full-time curriculum.
Seeking a solution
Teaching Executive MBA students here and in China often inspires Milbourn’s research.
“Research for me is all about finding interesting puzzles and trying to seek out a solution or remedy,” he says.
His most recent paper analyzes CEO compensation and received the Citigroup Award for best paper at the Centre for Analytical Finance Summer Research Conference in July at the Indian School of Business. The paper, titled “Strategic Flexibility and the Optimality of Pay for Sector Performance,” is co-authored with Gopalan and Fenghua Song, Ph.D., of Pennsylvania State University.
“I love the research,” Milbourn says. “The research is the raw material that we teach. The research method also provides discipline in how you approach problems, how you think about solutions to problems and how much confidence you put in a solution.”
Chakravarthi Narasimhan, Ph.D., the Philip L. Siteman Professor of Marketing, has known Milbourn since he arrived at Olin.
“I have watched him enhance his research reputation, and I have seen his stature grow steadily among his peers at Olin,” Narasimhan says. “Todd is a delightful colleague, engaging and always ready to contribute to make Olin a better place.”