The endowed professorship was established by Trustee Wesley Elingburg and his wife, Cathy, in 2007.
Associate Professor of Finance Adam Aiken has been named the Wesley R. Elingburg Professor of Finance. Aiken is the third faculty member to hold the professorship, succeeding Finance Professor Wonhi Synn, who was named to the professorship in 2016.
Aiken joined the faculty of the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business in fall 2015 as an assistant professor of finance and was named associate professor in 2020. His research interests include asset management, financial institutions and performance measurement with a particular focus on hedge funds. His research has been featured by The Economists, The Financial Times, Alpha and Reuters, among other media outlets.
Business education news outlet Poets&Quants named Aiken to its list of the top undergraduate business professors in 2020. Aiken received the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business Dean’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship in 2019 and 2020.
As a professor, Aiken has developed a reputation as one who is difficult, but who challenges his students in very positive ways. He incorporates current events and techniques used in the industry into this teaching, as evidenced by the types of materials h uses in classes and the feedback he receives from students. He serves as a member of the Love School of Business’s Curriculum Committee and has advocated for keeping the curriculum current and relevant.
Aiken has been active in creating new courses that help the finance major remain current in its curricular offerings, such as a newer course that is at the intersection of big data Analysis and finance and is taught in a common coding language. He has been among the leaders in the development of a financial technology (fintech) major that is expected to launch in 2023.
In nominating Aiken for the professorship, a colleague noted that his scholarship is “an example within the Finance Department, the Love School of Business and across the university,” with publications appearing in journals such as Management Science, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.
Before entering academia, Aiken worked as an analyst/associate with the UNC Management Co., the endowment arm of the university, in Chapel Hill, N.C. He is a member of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Investment Fund Board.
Aiken received his doctorate in finance from Arizona State University, a master’s degree in economics from Duke University and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the faculty at Elon, Aiken served as an assistant professor of finance at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut.
Trustee Wesley Elingburg, a certified public accountant who served on the Love School Board of Advisors for five years, and his wife, Cathy Elingburg, endowed the professorship in 2007 to enable Elon to recruit and retain top faculty in the business school. Wes Elingburg was elected to Elon’s Board of Trustees in 2005 and served as chair from 2012 to 2014. He retired from LabCorp as chief financial officer in 2005, and was previously a managing partner of the Greensboro Grasshoppers minor league baseball team in Greensboro, N.C. The Elingburgs are the parents of Nolan H. Elingburg, who earned a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism in 2011 and a master’s degree in interactive media in 2012.