Luann J. Lynch

Professor Luann J. Lynch teaches Accounting in the First Year core MBA program and a Second Year elective in management accounting. She is frequently recognized for her outstanding teaching; she was the recipient of the University of Virginia Alumni Board of Trustees Teaching Award and elected Faculty Marshall in 2000, was nominated for the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) in 2001, has been recognized as an Outstanding Professor in BusinessWeek’s Guide to the best Business Schools, and is frequently nominated for the Outstanding Faculty Award at Darden.

Her research interests are primarily in the design and impact of incentive and compensation systems. The focus of her work can be broadly characterized as an exploration of how incentives and compensation systems are structured to encourage the desired behavior by the individuals or organizations. In particular, her work has examined incentive issues associated with stock options; compensation in post-merger integration efforts; and the effect of financial reporting, accounting and regulation on incentive compensation. She has published her work in leading accounting and finance journals, including The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Accounting Studies. From 2006 to 2009, she held the Robert F. Vandell research chair at Darden in recognition of her research contributions. In 2006, she received the Glen McLaughlin Prize for Research in Accounting Ethics for work related to compensation around the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. From 2005 to 2008, she served as Darden’s Associate Dean for Intellectual Capital.

Lynch spent the 2004–2005 academic year teaching at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Prior to joining the faculty at the Darden School, she taught in the Master of Accounting program at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina. She was assistant vice president at Roche Biomedical Laboratories, Inc., and held positions in finance and accounting at Roche, Northern Telecom (NorTel) and Procter & Gamble. She holds an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and a doctorate in accounting from the University of North Carolina.