Finance professor Greg Kadlec has received a 2019 William E. Wine Award for teaching excellence at Virginia Tech.

The Wine Award was established in 1957 by the Virginia Tech Alumni Association in memory of William E. Wine, Class of 1904, a former rector of the Board of Visitors and president of the Alumni Association.

Kadlec, who joined Virginia Tech in 1992, is among the three faculty members at the university selected for the annual award. Each winner receives $2,000 and automatic induction into the Academy of Teaching Excellence.

In his nomination letter, finance department head John Easterwood said that Kadlec has excelled at all levels of instruction. Most notably, “Kadlec has developed a state-of-the-art class in investments that is consistently oversubscribed by students and recognized every year as one of the best finance classes by graduating seniors.”

Kadlec brings a wealth of knowledge to the classroom from his nationally recognized research in investments and his extensive industry connections, Easterwood said, as well as his intense preparation, with several hundred pages worth of course material.

Kadlec has received high evaluations from undergraduate and graduate students and many teaching awards, including the Herakovich Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award, given to a faculty member selected by a committee of top-performing graduating seniors. Kadlec won the award for 2013-14 and has been one of the top 3 finalists every year since the award’s inception in 2012. “Simply put,” Easterwood said, “students respect him and the quality of his instruction.”

Kadlec’s former students have attested to their professor’s influence on them. Brian Slingerland, who co-founded a biotechnology company in San Francisco that is developing anti-cancer drugs, wrote that Kadlec was “one of the brightest, innovative, and hardest working teachers I had at Virginia Tech.”

Michela Verardo, who teaches at the London School of Economics, wrote that Kadlec’s “engaging personality and his energy made a big difference in learning material.” She still regards the notes she took in his graduate courses as a “valuable resource of inspiration for my own teaching.”

Kadlec is also strongly committed to the success of the finance Ph.D. program and its students. In addition to teaching, he has been a longtime member or chair of the departmental Ph.D. committee. His three most recent Ph.D. students received tenure-track faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, Florida State University, and Northeastern University.

Kadlec, who holds the Pamplin and Oliver professorships, has played a key role in two important initiatives of the department that have greatly enhanced the educational environment for students. He served for eight years as one of the founding faculty co-advisors to SEED (Student-managed Endowment for Educational Development), a well-known, student-run group that manages a $5-million equity portfolio for the Virginia Tech Foundation.

Kadlec has served on the college’s undergraduate curriculum committee for many years and as chair of the committee for four of the past five years. During this time the committee undertook initiatives that have substantially improved the undergraduate curriculum, including new finance courses and degree options for specialized training — such as the Fintech option, which combines finance classes with engineering, math, statistics, and computer science to position students for career paths in finance that rely on big data and machine learning.

Under Kadlec’s leadership, the committee also developed a way to change the college’s course sequencing, allowing students to make more informed decisions about their specialization areas and better compete for internships and jobs.

“He is very visible in the profession and a regular participant at the top conferences,” Easterwood wrote. “In summary, Dr. Kadlec is a complete package — excellence in teaching, research, and service.”

Written by Sookhan Ho