Goran Skosples
Bishop Herbert Welch Meritorious Teaching Award (2024)
2024 Commencement Ceremony Excerpt
Dr. Goran Skosples is a passionate teacher and scholar who lives and breathes the principles of the liberal arts education. He has helped numerous generations of students realize connections between the classroom and the real world, and helped them find their place in it. Dr. Skosples' main area of research deals with institutional changes in post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and he has published work on the ability of firms to access finance in informationally opaque environments. However, Dr. Skosples believes that Economics is what economists do, and his research interests have spanned studying the impact of internet access on employment during the COVID pandemic, the impact of solar farms on nearby property values, and the effect of fatigue on soccer players following their participation in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
He enjoys supervising independent studies and collaborating with students on his research projects. Dr. Skosples organizes the annual Economic Outlook Conference at the University and is an active speaker to Central Ohio organizations about the state of the economy. He was also instrumental in creating the Quantitative Economics major, which was the first science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) major in the social sciences at Ohio Wesleyan University.