Research Chairs
Research chairs at the Lang School are an eclectic group of academic and research leaders from a wide range of disciplines that consistently produce breakthrough research and generate substantial impact. The research chairs contribute to Lang’s pillar of generating research with impact that informs policy, business and practice.
Explore Lang's research chairs below.
The Lang Chairs help advance Lang’s position as a globally focused business school, dedicated to improving life through purpose-driven management education. The Chair positions cover strategic areas of strength of the Lang School, including Leadership, Sport Management, Finance and Marketing.
Funding for the Lang Chair positions comes from the transformation $21-million gift from Stu and Kim Lang in 2019 which named U of G’s business school after Stu’s late father Gordon.
Dr. Laurie Barclay is the Lang Chair in Leadership and full professor within the Department of Management. Her research interests focus on fairness and its intersection with leadership and creating healthy workplaces. Topics include identifying how leaders can promote fairness (and the obstacles that prevent them from doing so), when and why unfairness occurs in the workplace (including how it can be prevented, mitigated, and recovered from), and how leaders can effectively manage fairness issues at the levels of the individual, group, and organization.
Dr. Ann Pegoraro is the Lang Chair in Sport Management and currently holds an appointment as a full professor in Lang's School of Hospitality, Food, and Tourism. She is also the co-Director of the National Network for Research on Gender Equity in Canadian Sport. Dr. Pegoraro's research focuses mainly on sport consumers, marketing and communication, including how different forms of media are used to establish connections with consumers of sport at all levels from amateur to professional. Her recent work in digital media and innovation is focused on analytics, gender and diversity.
Dr. Sourav Ray is the Lang Chair in Marketing and is a highly sought-after expert whose research aims to understand strategic issues in business-to-business marketing, distribution channels, pricing, emerging technologies and technology-intensive markets. Earlier, Ray was the Michael Lee-Chin and Family Professor in Strategic Business Studies, professor of marketing and research director of the Marketing and Supply Chain Analytics lab at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University. He earned his PhD in marketing from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Ilias Tsiakas is the Lang Chair in Finance and full professor within Lang's Department of Economics and Finance. He was previously Associate Professor of Finance at Warwick Business School in the UK, and Director of the Warwick PhD program in Finance. Dr. Tsiakas is an active researcher in asset pricing, international finance, financial econometrics, and climate finance. He holds a 5-year research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to study the role of global financial markets in regulating carbon emissions.
The John F. Wood Chairs provide insight and expertise in the areas of entrepreneurship and innovation. Funding for the Wood Chairs comes from the Wood family's $7-million gift in 2018 to launch the John F. Wood Centre for Business and Student Enterprise.
Dr. Barak S. Aharonson is the John F. Wood Chair in Innovation and associate professor in the Department of Management. He is a globally recognized scholar in strategic management and entrepreneurship studies entrepreneurial tendencies and innovation activities within geographic clusters as well as how businesses utilize technology to boost their profitability.
Learn more about Dr. Aharonson
Dr. Felix Arndt is the John F. Wood Chair in Entrepreneurship in the Department of Management. His research intersects strategy, entrepreneurship, and innovation. He looks at how firms use organisational renewal and technological innovation to stay ahead of the competition (dynamic capabilities, ecosystems, business models). He also explores how entrepreneurs overcome extreme challenges (e.g. of socio-economic or medical nature). His research has frequently used the emerging market context (e.g. China). Some of his research uses corporate social responsibility questions and the context of contested industries (tobacco, nuclear power, etc.).
Dr Simon Somogyi holds the Arrell Chair in the Business of Food and is a Full Professor in the School of Hospitality, Food & Tourism Management, University of Guelph. He is also the Director of the Longo's Food Retail Laboratory at Lang. Over the past decade he has lead and contributed to research and development value chain projects across the world. Most of these projects involve creating and delivering consumer driven food supply chains, linking members of the chain from input supply and primary production to retail, particularly in the beverage, seafood and horticulture sectors.
The Research Leadership Chairs are faculty members who have achieved significant research recognition both nationally and internationally, acknowledging the UofG commitment to enhancing diversity in research leadership.
The following faculty members have been named to the Research Leadership Chair program.
Dr. Ann Pegoraro is the Lang Chair in Sport Management and currently holds an appointment as a full professor in Lang's School of Hospitality, Food, and Tourism. She is also the co-Director of the National Network for Research on Gender Equity in Canadian Sport. Dr. Pegoraro's research focuses mainly on sport consumers, marketing and communication, including how different forms of media are used to establish connections with consumers of sport at all levels from amateur to professional. Her recent work in digital media and innovation is focused on analytics, gender and diversity.
Dr. Yiguo Sun, Department of Economics and Finance, specializes in econometrics, a branch of economics that uses math and statistics to uncover meaningful connections between different economic factors, such as income, employment, consumer behavior, and investment decisions. Econometric insights help shape policies and forecast economic trends. Sun currently uses econometric approaches to study the impacts of geography and social networks on economic outcomes. Her recent projects explore how these factors affect regional development, Canadian residential housing markets, peer influence on student achievement, national trade agreements, and economic spillover effects between exchange-traded funds and individual stocks.