Janet Marler

Associate Professor
Ph. D., Cornell University

[HRIS is] our major competency and a distinguishing feature of our program.

Janet Marler began her academic career at Cornell University in 1990 before joining School of Business at UAlbany in 2000. Some years earlier she earned her bachelors and masters degrees in financial management from Cornell, and joined Arthur Anderson & Co, then the largest public accounting firm in the world. Once certified as a CPA, Janet moved from the audit world to be corporate controller for Burgess & Leith, an old-line Boston securities firm. It was 1982, the bottom of a bear market and the beginning of a time of mergers and acquisitions. After her company was acquired for a second time by a larger regional investment bank and a promotion required moving from Boston to New York, she joined Torchmark Corporation to be in charge of developing private placement investments. “It was a great time and we made a lot of money. I was promoted to Vice President and had a fabulous office overlooking Boston Harbor. Then the tax laws changed and our division was sold.”

It was while at Torchmark that Janet was recruited by Cornell to join their financial management faculty. Always interested in teaching and research, she jumped at the opportunity to become an academic, moving her family which included her husband, Bryan, who moved into sales with Digital Equipment Corporation, and their two young sons to Ithaca, NY. Later she began her Ph.D. at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) in order to focus on her personal interest in developing policy and organizational strategies related to the increasing presence of dual career families in the labor force. Her eventual focus in macro human resources and labor economics is an area she notes that is a “highly undervalued business topic but represents enormous opportunities for organizations to achieve competitive advantage.” After earning her Ph.D in 2000, Janet joined the School of Business faculty at UAlbany, teaching graduate classes in human resource management and undergraduate classes in compensation. She soon developed a specialization in human resource information systems, which she describes as “our major competency and a distinguishing feature of our program.”

Dr. Marler serves on the advisory board for the Oracle Academic Initiative and is the treasurer of the HR Division of the Academy of Management. She recently returned from a sabbatical leave spent at UPenn’s Wharton School where she was a visiting associate professor and conducted research on the role institutional shareholders play in influencing portfolio firm’s equity compensation strategy. At the Academy of Management conference this summer, she and colleague Rich Johnson presented research on the role the Internet plays in effective global human resource management. She has published her research in many top academic journals including Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management, and Personnel Psychology and the International Journal of Human Resources. She has also authored several book chapters on human resource information systems.

Her husband Bryan is a sales executive at Hewlett Packard. They have two sons. Their eldest son is a Cornell graduate and works for Facebook in California. Their younger son attends the School of Management of Binghamton University and plays Division I golf.