Nancy Staudenmayer, a dedicated academic and innovative teacher, died this week at her home in Durham. She was 36.
Although the assistant professor of management at the Fuqua School of Business had suffered from a long-term illness, her death came as a surprise to many of her colleagues.
Staudenmayer, a New York native. Colleagues described her as a focused scholar with much potential.
"Doing research and teaching was the absolute center of her life, and she was very, very good at them," said Sim Sitkin, an associate professor at Fuqua.
Sitkin and Staudenmayer co-chaired the school's distinguished speaker series, worked with each other on a number of administrative projects and were planning to begin research together.
After not hearing from Staudenmayer earlier this week, her family began to worry and contacted the Durham Police Department to investigate. On Tuesday, police found her dead in her home. A police spokesperson said she died of natural causes.
Staudenmayer's illness-the details of which she kept private, even from her friends-did not stop her from successfully overcoming the obstacles that junior faculty face.
"We are very sad about the loss of Nancy. She has been a wonderful colleague," said Gerry DeSanctis, a professor at Fuqua and a friend of Staudenmayer. "Junior faculty have a lot of pressure to do many things: to do their own research, to achieve excellence in the classroom, to aid in the recruitment of new faculty, to serve on committees-and she worked extremely well at all of these."
Staudenmayer's academic pursuits focused on problems related to product development, particularly on how businesses can overcome inefficiencies posed by dynamics among customers, testers, programmers and other employees. Her Ph.D. work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Business was a comparison of how two major companies dealt with these types of problems.
"Nancy didn't pick something where she'd write a theory paper-she did a piece of empirical work," said Steve Eppinger, an associate professor at Sloan and a member of Staudenmayer's thesis review committee. "It requires maturity, devotion and seriousness that not every student has-which is why she ended up at Duke."
In addition to her passion for traditional academic work, Staudenmayer had taken on a number of non-research activities since her arrival at Fuqua in 1997. Colleagues said she was a key force in enhancing the Ph.D. and strategy curricula at Fuqua.
"[Nancy] has been instrumental in the past years in expanding and enhancing the quality and breadth within the school," Sitkin said. "This has been a key part in building up the academic climate at Fuqua."
Eppinger said that the combination of Staudenmayer's high-quality research with her devotion to education suggested that she would have likely become one of the best scholars in her field.
"She was wonderful," Eppinger said. "She's a serious scholar, very thoughtful, committed to her work, devoted to scholarly excellence, and I was looking forward to following her career. She had a bright future and we expected wonderful things from her over the next few years."
Staudenmayer is survived by her younger brother, her mother and her father.
A memorial service is scheduled for 11 a.m. today at Duke Chapel.
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