Assistant professor Alex Murray is crossing departmental lines to help prepare business students for their careers.  

Murray has received the Ersted Award for Distinguished Teaching. He has been a faculty member in the management department of the Lundquist College of Business over the past five years. 

Murray said he encourages students to go outside their comfort zone and works to build a welcoming environment that allows students to think critically, share their thoughts, and challenge each other in meaningful ways.  

While he goes into each class with a topic and a few learning objectives he wants students to come away with, Murray keeps an open mind about how they get there, even if it means taking a detour when a TikTok clip a student saw sparks a conversation. For him, it’s about staying curious and building the journey together. 

Something he learned early in his teaching career was the importance of sharing his story with his students, both his personal and professional experiences, to bridge the gap between students and professor. In each course, Murray creates space for students to ask questions openly and freely.  

“Sometimes it gets really honest and vulnerable, and I think having those spaces where students feel safe and open and willing to share, but also willing to ask fosters a really cool learning environment,” he said.

A little over a year ago, Murray had an exciting opportunity for experimentation in his teaching. A student in the MBA program came to him asking if he could develop a class on innovation, which had been a gap in the curriculum. He pitched it to his department head, and it got fast-tracked to launch in winter term of 2024.  

Developing partnerships with the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact and the UO Foundation, Murray survived the chaotic dash to the finish line, and 46 students registered for the first-ever offering. The class was a learning experience for everyone involved, he said. 

Each week, a lab presented their research in the class and answered students’ questions. Students then had the opportunity to develop commercialization strategies for the technologies and present their work to the labs. 

“When you're surrounded by other business students in courses at Lundquist, you might not realize that your skillset is valuable in settings where people don't have it,” he said. “I've received messages from labs across campus since then, saying, “Hey, do you have business students who might be able to work on a project or help us think something through?’” 

Even after started his teaching journey with the University of Oregon five years ago, Murray is still finding ways to evolve as a professor. Over the previous summer, he joined the week-long Summer Teaching Institute, which focused on Generative AI (genAI).  

So far, Murray said he’s been really open to including genAI in his classes, giving students the green light to use it with a goal of helping them discover ways these tools could help enhance their work in their future careers. Murray said the institute gave him a much-appreciated opportunity to slow down and reflect. 

“The teaching institute was really the first time I’ve done something like that, and I was receptive and open to it. I’m happy I did it because, if anything, it forced me to stop and think critically about how I approach a classroom,” he said. “To actually take that time to ask myself ‘What do I tell my students to do?’ and ‘Why do I teach this way? How can I more meaningfully integrate AI? Or how can I make this better?’” 

Murray said he learns so much more from his students than they learn from him, and being able to explore ideas with them is what keeps him excited and motivated, even on days when he’s teaching seven hours in a row.

— Chelsea Hunt, Office of the Provost Communications