Office Space

Yan “Anthea” Zhang has spent her entire academic career at Rice Business, joining the school when it was still located in Herring Hall, after completing her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California.

The walls, shelves and cabinets of her office in McNair convey a love for her family with framed photos and art from when her children Sophia (an associate at Goldman Sachs Bank) and James (today a second-year student at Rice’s Brown residential college) were younger. A family photo also shows her husband, Haiyang Li, the H. Joe Nelson III Professor of Management. There are a lot of smiling faces in this room.

Students, visitors and colleagues can feel at ease when they stop by Zhang’s office, whether to chat or to exchange ideas from the comfy blue couch.

It’s also clearly a space where work gets done. Zhang uses the small whiteboard on her wall to work through modeling and logics with her Ph.D. students, and her shelves hold stacks of dataset documents, journals, articles and her recent book “Crossroads of Family Businesses in China: Succession and Transformation.”

2024 has been a professionally gratifying year for Zhang, professor and the Fayez Sarofim Vanguard Chair of Strategic Management and president of the Strategic Management Society. In April, she was elected to be a Fellow of the Academy of International Business (AIB), joining a prestigious group of scholars who have shaped the field of international business. She is also a Fellow of the Strategic Management Society. This semester, she is on sabbatical at INSEAD in France, where she’ll be continuing her research on female entrepreneurship in tech industries and succession issues in the context of family businesses.