Fisher Ph.D. students receive significant honors

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Stephen Brown, a Ph.D. student at the Fisher School of Accounting at the Warrington College of Business Administration, is a recipient of a 2011 American Accounting Association/Grant Thornton Doctoral Dissertation Award for Innovation in Accounting Education.

The award, one of only five given annually by the AAA, is designed to assist third-year or fourth-year Ph.D. students conducting innovative research in any area of accounting. The research must clearly demonstrate a substantial degree of innovation relative to the current state of research.

Brown’s current research interests include the motivations, methods and consequences of communicating via soft disclosures, with a focus on the auditor-client relationship, textual narratives and conference calls. His research has been presented at various conferences and published in the Journal of Accounting Research. His dissertation uses narrative disclosures to examine the relationship between client similarities and characteristics of the audit market.

Two other Fisher Ph.D. students also received distinct honors. Matthew Driskill was named a member of the PhD Project Accounting Doctoral Students Association. The Ph.D. Project was established by The KPMG Foundation to encourage minorities at the graduate level to look at a career in academia. Since 1994, the program has more than tripled the number of minority business professors from 294 to more than 1,000. Currently, the PhD Project has approximately 400 minority doctoral students.

Also, incoming Ph.D. student Devin Williams has received a four-year Accounting Doctoral Scholarship totaling $120,000.