Professor M. Diane Burton will lead the ILR School center that researches, teaches and communicates about monetary and non-monetary rewards from work, and how rewards influence outcomes for individuals, companies, industries and economies.

She begins July 1 as director of the Institute for Compensation Studies, Alex Colvin, Ph.D. ’99, announced May 5. Colvin is ILR’s Kenneth F. Kahn ’69 Dean and the Martin F. Scheinman ’75, MS ’76, Professor of Conflict Resolution.

Burton succeeds founding director Kevin F. Hallock, ILR’s Joseph R. Rich ’80 Professor of Economics and Human Resource Studies, who departs Cornell in August to begin as president of the University of Richmond. Hallock is a former dean of the SC Johnson School of Business, where he is a professor.

Burton, an organizational sociologist, is a professor in the ILR School’s Department of Human Resource Studies and serves as the department chairperson. She holds courtesy appointments in ILR’s Department of Organizational Behavior and Cornell’s Department of Sociology.

Burton started her academic career studying the employment practices, leadership and organizational evolution of high-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley, including researching entrepreneurial teams and executive careers. Her current focus is on job creation and job quality as part of total rewards in entrepreneurial firms. She is part of an international research team using Danish administrative data to study wages of employees in new firms. Burton serves on a committee convened by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine studying the role of inducement prizes in spurring American innovation.

Involved with Entrepreneurship@Cornell and the university-wide undergraduate business minor, she has also served as a Provost Fellow for Public Engagement in Cornell University’s Office of the Vice Provost and Office of Engagement Initiatives to contribute to the broad mission of public engagement at the university. Burton works with the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies, which convenes working groups of academics and practitioners to engage in mutual learning on selected topics as a faculty expert and advisory board member.

Before joining the Cornell faculty in 2009, Burton was a faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She began her academic career at the Harvard Business School, where she taught leadership and organizational behavior.



This story also appears on the ILR website.

Mary Catt is the ILR School’s communications director.