The Osgoode community is celebrating today’s announcement that Professor Poonam Puri has been named the new York Research Chair (YRC) in Corporate Governance, Investor Protection and Financial Markets.
“This is great news for Professor Puri, for Osgoode and for York,” said Professor and Associate Dean (Research and Institutional Relations) Trevor Farrow. “It’s a strong testament to Professor Puri’s longstanding commitment to excellence in her scholarship and to her standing in the domestic and international academic community.”
According to the July 4 announcement by York University, “Puri’s YRC explores the role of the corporation in society and the impact of legal rules, as well as market mechanisms and incentives on corporate behaviour in several key areas of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG). These include racial justice, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and climate change, as well as the role of the corporation and financial markets in times of disruptive technological change.”
“Puri’s cutting-edge, empirical, and interdisciplinary research program,” it adds, “charts a new course for the modern corporation, casting it not solely as a profit-maximizer for its shareholders, but as a responsible corporate citizen that genuinely considers the interests of a wider range of stakeholders and is accountable to society.”
Puri is an internationally recognized scholar of corporate law, corporate governance and capital markets regulation and is the co-founder and director of the Osgoode Investor Protection Clinic. She is also the founder and director of the Business Law LLM program at Osgoode Professional Development. She is a recipient of several prestigious fellowships and awards and has received more than $5 million in external research funding, including five grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
In total, the university announced 15 new York Research Chairs in this round, the 10th cohort to be appointed since the program was first launched by the Office of the Vice President Research and Innovation in 2015. The new YRCs will conduct research in a variety of fields, ranging from human and computer vision to children’s musical cultures to the impacts of climate change on lakes.
The YRC program consists of two tiers. Tier 1 is open to established research leaders at the rank of full professor. Tier 2 is aimed at emerging research leaders within 15 years of their first academic appointment. All Chairs have five-year terms.