Best Poster award winners at the 2025 Business PhD Research Conference

The Best Poster Awards at the 2025 Business PhD Research Conference, which took place at the Alberta School of Business on November 28, recognize doctoral students whose research stands out for both analytical strength and clarity of insight. Spanning health-care operations, organizational theory and international finance, this year’s winning posters highlight how careful empirical work and strong theoretical framing can help address complex organizational and economic challenges. 

View the best posters

1st place — Decision-Aware Surgery Scheduling Under Uncertain Durations

Hospitals must assign elective cases to a limited number of operating-room "blocks," but scheduling is complex due to uncertain surgery durations. In addition, surgeons' time estimates for specific cases are often noisy and typically conservative. Yet estimation errors result in costs: cases running long lead to overtime, while cases ending early result in wasted capacity (idle time). The researchers propose a decision-aware scheduling policy that aims to minimize these costs.

2nd place — When 'Who We Are' Becomes 'What We Do': How Collective Orchestrators Become Stuck in Organizational Identity (OI) Rumination

By Natalie Eng, 6th Year Business PhD Candidate in Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Management

Collective ecosystem orchestrators — formal collectives that seek to develop ecosystems to support the development and growth of ventures — face the challenge of aligning diverse members without formal hierarchies. This research shows that such orchestrators can become stuck in endless efforts to define their identity — a process the authors call organizational identity rumination. Studying a Canadian ecosystem orchestrator, they find that repeated cycles of seeking input, exploring too many identity possibilities, and sustaining positive emotional energy can cause organizations to lose focus and make reactive decisions, a state they describe as organizational quicksand.

3rd place - The Structure and Drivers of Base and Carry Exposures in Bilateral Currency Risk

By Golnoush Omidali, 3rd Year Business PhD Student in Finance



What makes currencies move together across countries? Traditional approaches look at currency risk in broad strokes, which hides the unique relationships between specific country pairs. This research separates global currency co-movements into two key forces: structural economic links (the base factor) and financial return differences (the carry factor). Using data from 1983 to 2020, the study shows that long-term currency patterns are shaped by deep structural ties such as trade, geography, and legal similarity, while financial drivers vary more over time. The findings connect real-world economic relationships with financial market behavior to explain how global currency risks form and evolve.

Learn more about the PhD Program at the Alberta School of Business here.