From left to right: Chao Chen, Jerry Kim, Mike Barnett, Danielle Warren, Tobey Scharding, Joanne Ciulla, Wayne Eastman, and Rob Hughes (not shown: Jeffrey Robinson and JC Spender).
Meet the IEL
RBS is proud to have one of the country's largest faculties of business ethics scholars, and they are the Fellows of the IEL. The Fellows help plan and implement IEL programs for students and practitioners and engage in collaborative research. They pursue empirical and theoretical research in areas such as organizational ethics, leadership ethics, business ethics, CSR, philosophical ethics, and ethics and social innovation. The Fellows work with graduate students and teach business ethics, CSR, and social innovation courses to Rutgers’ students and practitioners.
The IEL was co-founded in 2003 by James Abruzzo, former Executive Vice President and Managing Director of the Nonprofit Practice of DHR International, and Alex Plinio, a former President/CEO of the American Field Service and senior executive at Prudential Financial.
The institute originally supported teaching and research in business ethics and primarily served the non-profit sector. Over the years, its ethics and leadership programs have made a significant impact on non-profit leadership in New Jersey and beyond. Some of them included the Cultural and Ethnic Arts Executive Leadership Program to develop diversity in the arts and cultural fields, the Prudential Fellows for senior nonprofit leaders, the Victoria Leadership Program for emerging leaders, the Nonprofit Capacity Building Speaker Series, and The Nonprofit Professionals of Color Collective.
When Joanne Ciulla became the director in 2018, she wanted to capitalize on the extraordinary faculty doing work related to ethics in business and leadership, so she established the IEL Research Fellows. Their knowledge and experience are the heart of the IEL and its programs. Since 2018, the IEL began refocusing its mission to align its work with the needs and interests of the business sector.
Meet the Director
Joanne B. Ciulla brings over forty-five years of experience teaching and writing about ethics and delivering ethics programs for business and government agencies worldwide. Before joining the RBS faculty in 2017, she taught at La Salle University, the Wharton School, and the University of Richmond. At Richmond, she was an architect of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, the first degree-granting liberal arts school of leadership studies in the world. She was a Fulbright Specialist, held the UNESCO Chair in Leadership Studies, and has had visiting appointments in South Africa, The Netherlands, and Australia. An internationally known scholar with a Ph.D. in philosophy, she has received three lifetime achievement awards for her scholarship and a lifetime achievement award for her service to the field of business ethics. Ciulla is a past president of the Society for Business Ethics and the International Society for Business Ethics and Economics. She has given seminars and presented worldwide at such places as the Aspen Institute, The Brookings Institution, and the World Economic Forum. She shares her thoughts on leadership and ethics in this interview on Voice of America. Listen to Interview.