Position: Assistant Professor in Finance
University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) is one of three campuses at the University of Toronto (UofT), alongside the St. George downtown campus and University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC). The advertised Assistant Professor position involves a primary appointment at the Department of Management at UTM, as well as a cross-appointment to the Rotman School of Management and a graduate appointment to the tri-campus Graduate Department of Management. This document aims to provide information about the tri-campus structure, as well as the research support, teaching load, and tenure standards.
Location. The UTM campus is situated on 225 acres of protected greenbelt along the Credit River, 33 km west of the St. George campus, which hosts the Rotman School of Management. The third campus, UTSC, is located on the east side of the city.
The Department of Management is located in the recently renovated Innovation Complex, featuring case-study rooms, behavioral research labs, and a bright rotunda for gathering and studying.
Finance faculty at UTM. At UTM, the Finance area is part of the Department of Management – alongside related areas such as Accounting, Economic Analysis and Policy, Marketing, Strategy, etc. Currently, there are 40 full-time faculty members in the Department of Management across all functional areas.
The Finance group consists of five tenure-stream faculty members (two Full Professors and three Assistant Professors) and two teaching-stream faculty members. The faculty members’ research interests span a wide range of fields -- including corporate finance, gender and entrepreneurship, behavioral finance, FinTech, and market microstructure.
Cross-appointment at Rotman School of Management. Tenure-stream faculty members at UTM are cross-appointed with the Rotman School of Management. In addition to their personal office at UTM, they receive a shared office space at Rotman. In practice, this stimulates a vibrant research atmosphere across all three campuses of UofT, spanning more than 40 faculty members overall. Rotman organizes a weekly seminar series in finance, as well as a weekly Brown Bag series, where junior faculty are especially encouraged to present their early-stage work. Seminar series in other disciplines and at the Department of Economics may also be of interest.
Further, tenure-stream faculty members at the UTM are appointed to the Graduate Department of Management, an umbrella structure for graduate appointments for all Management faculty at the University of Toronto. In practice, this means junior faculty can serve on PhD student committees and give PhD lectures.
Teaching. The standard pre-tenure load is three (3) sections per year, typically at undergraduate level in the Bachelor of Commerce (BComm) program. Sections can belong to the same course, or to different courses, subject to preferences and scheduling constraints. Teaching takes place at the Mississauga campus. Courses at UTM run on 12-week terms (Fall, Winter, and Summer), and each class meets once a week for two hours. That is, the pre-tenure teaching load is only 72 hours per year (12 weeks x 2 hours/class x 3 courses/year). Section sizes typically range from 40 to 60 students. Tenure-stream faculty can choose to teach their load in a single term if they wish so, depending on scheduling constraints.
The MBA, other professional degrees and PhD degrees are offered by the Rotman School of Management.
Resources and research support. All three campuses offer identical salaries, stipends, and access to research funds. All new faculty receive an annual start-up grant over the first six years to start their research projects. There are ample additional research funds to be accessed both internally (e.g., the Connaught New Faculty Research Grant, the Institute for Gender and the Economy – GATE, Behavioural Economics in Action @ Rotman – BEAR, or FinHub – the Financial Innovation Lab) as well as externally (from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada – SSHRC or the Canadian Securities Institute Research Foundation).
Rotman subscribes to a wide cross-section of financial databases used in academic research, such as Datastream, SDC Platinum, Factset, and most of the databases provided via WRDS (e.g., TAQ, TRACE, Optionmetrics, and Thomson Reuters). UTM faculty has full access to all the above databases.
Rotman also boasts several cutting-edge financial labs. The TD Management Data and Analytics Lab (MDAL) is a central source of knowledge and expertise in data science, AI, and machine learning applications. Through MDAL, finance faculty at UTM can access the Rotman Research Node computer cluster to perform computationally intensive tasks. The BMO Finance Research and Trading Lab is a state-of-the-art facility that focuses on the integration of theory and research with practice, and can be used – for example – to run market-based experiments using proprietary software such as the Rotman Interactive Trader or Rotman Portfolio Manager.
At the UTM campus, the Department hosts a facility called the Li Koon Chun Finance Learning Centre which incorporates a state-of-the-art financial trading lab that includes the latest financial database software, an academic resource center and customized instructional support for classroom teaching.
Tenure requirements. The tenure rules and requirements are identical across all three campuses. Research and teaching are the two most important components. To be tenured, a faculty member must demonstrate “excellence in research” and “competence in teaching”. The former translates to original contributions to the field as manifested by publications in, e.g., top-tier journals. Research profiles of current faculty members of the Finance area from all three campuses of UofT is available here.
About Toronto. Toronto is Canada’s business and financial capital, a growing financial hub in North America, and a top ten global financial center. It is a vibrant and multicultural city, recognized by the United Nations as the most diverse city in the world. The city offers a bustling downtown core as well as diverse neighborhoods, each of them proudly representing its cultural heritage. Finally, in 2017, Toronto was recognized by The Economist as the safest city in North America and one of the top five safest cities globally.