By Rick Vacek | May 27, 2025
Dr. Vijay Mookerjee comes from a family of teachers. Both parents. Grandparents on both sides.
“It’s something that’s ingrained in me,” said the Professor of Information Systems and Charles and Nancy Davidson Chair in the Naveen Jindal School of Management (JSOM).
“My father was also a professor, and many of his friends were his students. That has been my style. When I take on a doctoral student, the student becomes a part of our family.”
The family-style approach is just one of the reasons why Mookerjee was named the 2025 winner of the Provost’s Award for Faculty Excellence in Graduate Research Mentoring.
Another is his ability to further their careers after they leave The University of Texas at Dallas.
“Dr. Mookerjee’s prolific rate as an advisor has resulted in a constant stream of well-rounded, top-quality students who have served as flagbearers for UT Dallas,” the selection committee’s report stated.
“Given the high degree of competition for faculty positions in the Information Systems field in recent years, Dr. Mookerjee’s success in placing students at top research universities is unparalleled among senior colleagues in Information Systems.”
But even then, his advice has a family reference.
“Most of these good universities require good performance in the classroom,” he said, “and that is correlated to their ability to articulate their research, show enthusiasm and be able to explain it at various levels.
“I tell them, ‘Tell about your research as if your grandmother is listening to it.’ Everybody should relate to what you’re doing.”
More from the committee:
“Mookerjee has not limited himself to mentoring students in the Information Systems area alone; he has also worked with many students in the Operations Management area, some of whom have become leaders in the field.
“Such a strong record of placement success has strong roots in his exceptional ability to understand the exact needs of each student and then provide guidance tailored to their best interests. This humane approach enables students to grow and supports those who may face challenges beyond what is typically considered in the academic realm.”
Mookerjee’s first order of business is helping students understand what they need to do.
“The initial research phase of the doctoral program is more quantity than quality,” he said. “In other words, try to generate as many ideas as you can, and then take each one of them and either develop them or say it’s not worth pursuing.
“They often think they can only talk with an advisor once they have a full-fledged idea. I tell them, ‘No, no, you don’t need to do that. You can tell me three ideas a day. That is how your brain works.’ The first phase is more like brainstorming … seeing what catches their interest.”
A data-driven approach fits with JSOM’s research, which Mookerjee calls “very quantitative.”
“That requires a lot of data and data analytics and mathematical modeling,” he added. “I think maybe that reflects what kind of world we are living in. Managers are no longer just working from gut feel and intuition. They need hard data and models and, of course, AI (artificial intelligence).”
JSOM also used data to create UTD24, a database with titles and author affiliations of papers published in 24 leading business journals. That enables JSOM to rank the top 100 business schools since 1990 based on the total contributions of faculty.
But when he’s mentoring a doctoral student, Mookerjee counts on something else that sounds more like offspring going off on their own.
“The PhD is more about making the student independent of you,” he said. “I think that is the goal. By the end of the program, they don’t need you.”
They’re still part of the family, though. It’s ingrained.