Haslam College of Business - Preparing for Adventure: Tracie Woidtke

Tracie Woidtke was on the faculty at Texas A&M University when the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, opened the Neel Corporate Governance Center in 2003. Jim Wansley, head of the Department of Finance, reached out to Woidtke to see if she’d be interested in a new faculty position they were creating.

“I agreed to meet with founding members of the CGC and the finance faculty,” she says. “I felt it was a very good fit for my research interests.” Woidtke and her husband, Shane, soon relocated to Knoxville with their two young children, Skyler and Knox. “When they were old enough to start reading, my son wondered why his name was on all the buses here,” she laughs. “They were both born in Texas, and we didn’t know we’d ever live here, so his name is a coincidence.”

Diving into her work at the college, Woidtke became Ph.D. program director for the finance department at the Haslam College of Business and worked to improve the doctoral program while recruiting high-quality faculty. In January 2016, Woidtke was named the new department head when Wansley stepped down after more than twenty years of service. “Our research productivity has definitely been improving, and I think the whole department is excited about the trajectory,” she says. “I want to continue to support that and take it to the next level. I also want to focus a little more on undergraduates, internships and placements.”

Woidtke’s research has appeared in numerous accounting and finance journals, and her interests focus on corporate governance issues with public policy implications. “I’m particularly interested in institutional investors that target firms when they’re unhappy with firm performance,” she says. “I analyze whether that kind of shareholder activism actually makes a difference, or do these shareholders have their own private agenda?”

When she’s not researching or teaching, Woidtke strikes out with her family on adventures. “We’ve been zip lining over an alligator-infested lake, visited the pyramids in Egypt and gone paragliding together in Italy.” Woidtke and her husband own a Jeep Rubicon, which they often use for off-road family outings.

Woidtke hopes her children will embrace life’s adventures, whether they include traveling to other countries, trying a new sport, or going forward where others turn back. “We don’t want our kids to be anxious and afraid to attempt new things or forge their own path,” she says. “We try to teach them to think through a situation from different angles and prepare for it. If you’re well prepared, you can do things that appear to be daunting at first glance and have fun along the way without being reckless. Some of life’s most memorable moments are from taking the road less traveled.”