It is with immense sadness that the Telfer School of Management announces that Professor Peter Koppel passed away on Sunday, June 9, 2013 leaving his wife Ann Koppel to honour his legacy.
The Telfer School hosted a Memorial Service on Monday, June 24. We would like to thank all those who attended the service and who shared their many fond memories of Professor Koppel.
About Peter Koppel
In 1984 Professor Koppel entered the teaching profession on a full-time basis after thirteen years in the financial services industry. Having taught on a part-time basis prior to 1984, he began to realize that his true passion in life was not sitting in an office, but rather in the academic community where he felt he could truly make a difference in peoples’ lives. He left his senior management role and entered academia. For twenty-seven years, Professor Koppel taught in the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa. He has instructed over 60,000 students, consistently maintaining one of the highest evaluation rankings from students in the School and has, in fact, been named by McLean’s Magazine as one of the University’s best liked professors for eight consecutive years. In 2007, he was named one of the finalists in TV Ontario’s Lecturer of the Year Award Competition in the Province of Ontario.
In addition to his full-time teaching, Professor Koppel has served as the Director of the Undergraduate Program at the Telfer School of Management for thirteen years and also served as the School’s Assistant Dean of Student Services during the last eight years before his retirement. He is remembered for establishing the Telfer School’s Mentorship Program for first-year students, designed to ease the transition into university life, creating a Teaching Assistant Program to assist students in first and second year Management courses, being one of the founders of the local chapter of Beta Gamma Sigma, the honour society of AACSB accredited management schools, the Mindtrust Leadership Program held in partnership with Carleton University, and the National Leadership Challenge.
In addition to the above programs, he founded and was the visionary behind the Telfer School of Management’s student funded Career Centre, which has been actively assisting students in the development of their careers for more than a decade. This Centre now employs ten professionals and is recognized as one of the most successful and innovative University Career Centres in all of Canada.
Professor Koppel felt strongly about developing a well-rounded management graduate. He stressed the need for the manager to understand the dynamic environment within which he/she will do business. Ethics and social responsibility, honour, integrity, and trust are values he professed. While encouraging his students to be involved in community and social issues, he himself was actively involved both on the stage and behind the scenes while participating in the management students’ charitable organization, CASCO in its annual fund-raising show for CHEO. He also served on the Board of Directors of the Ottawa Youth Centre, has sat on the Province of Ontario’s Courts Management Board and was a member of the selection committee for Justices of the Peace. He was active in teaching senior police administrators from all over the world for fifteen years at the Canadian Police College.
Professor Koppel retired in 2011 after twenty-seven years of devoted service to the University of Ottawa.
