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March 8, 2026

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March 8, 2026

February 18, 2026 | Tom Breen

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Two teams of UConn MBA candidates are among an elite group of students advancing in the highly competitive National Ethics Case Competition. The teams—that tackled ethics in the pharmaceutical industry and in artificial intelligence—are among the 10 percent of entrants to move to Round 2 in the competition. Only 37 teams in total were selected from the more than 300 who entered. “This project was very ambitious for them. They all have important jobs with big responsibilities in defense, hospital tech, administration and more,’’ said business law professor Stephen Hudspeth, who encouraged his graduate students to participate. “The UConn School of Business is heavily committed to ethics. As a school we care about it enormously. We think our students should be well prepared to address a competition like this,’’ he said. In Round One, the teams had to create a trade association focused on ethical principles, define its scope and objectives, and compare how their guidance would relate to a profit-maximization strategy. Subhead: Turning Ethical Ideas Into Executive Decision-Making in Pharmaceuticals “This experience has reinforced for me that the hardest ethical decisions are rarely ‘right vs. wrong.’ They are tradeoffs between competing duties that all matter, made under real constraints like patient access, evidence integrity, and long-term viability,’’ said Kwenyerechi “Promise’’ Onuorah. Her teammates included Ryan Emerson, Josie-Ryan-Small and Willian Tellini. “What challenged me most was translating ethical ideals into an executive-level decision process that a board could actually use,’’ she said. “Building the four-stage approval funnel and the viability gate in the Round One submission forced me to be explicit about who benefits, who bears the costs, and what safeguards and accountability are needed so an initiative is both ethically defensible and sustainable over time.’’ The team’s submission presented an ethical decision framework for U.S. pharmaceutical companies to evaluate ethical initiatives that may reduce short-term profits while protecting long-term legitimacy and innovation capacity, she said. Using a four-stage approval funnel, the guide addresses five recurring industry dilemmas and issues clear recommendations, including requiring full clinical transparency and results reporting, encouraging tiered pricing and green manufacturing, and limiting neglected disease R&D and emergency IP sharing to structured safeguards or compensation. The competition judges deemed the paper among the Top Four and it will be published in a national journey after the competition ends. The other three top teams hailed from Cornell, Notre Dame and Utah. The four papers were selected based on “the depth of reasoning, clarity, and a strong engagement with complex ethical questions.’’ Subhead: Another Team Addressed Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Another UConn team also impressed the judges and is moving on to the next level of competition. “Our group selected AI as our industry because it is becoming the defining technology of our generation,’’ said Navdeep Singh. “The gap between the speed of AI development and lack of regulatory guardrails is where the consequential decisions, or lack thereof, are being made right now. We wanted to be in that space and try to create a framework that could be applied to real-world companies.’’ Singh’s teammates included Zayne Olsen, Brandon Kramp and Vanna Patel. “In Round One, our team created an Industry Guide to Ethical Business Practice. We focused on two of the industry's pressing concerns: the environmental impact of AI data centers, which are projected to cost the U.S. more than $20 billion annually, and the displacement of workers whose jobs are being automated away faster than retraining programs can keep up,’’ Singh said. Like their peers on the pharmaceuticals team, they discovered that ethical decision-making in business is rarely a straightforward and simple choice between right and wrong. “The framework we created gave AI companies a structured, principled way to evaluate social initiatives and business decisions using the values of integrity, trust, accountability, transparency, fairness, respect, rule of law, and viability,’’ he said. Subhead: Top Team Will Be Awarded $120,000 The National Ethics Case Competition is led by Texas A&M University in partnership with the Daniels Fund. Bill Daniels was a pioneer of cable TV and a visionary who believed in the power and responsibility of individuals to improve the world. The competition, open to undergraduate and graduate students, awards substantial prizes, including a first-place award of $120,000 divided between the team, the university, and the advisor. In Round 2, the teams are required to create a hypothetical situation for a company and its senior leadership that raises serious ethical concerns with intense ambiguity as to its resolution, building on their original paper. The two UConn teams have already submitted their proposal for Round 2 and are awaiting the results. If they move forward, they will compete in Rounds 3 and 4 in-person in Washington D.C. This is only the second time the competition was open to teams nationwide. A third team, composed of Jessica Ulbrich, Danielle Churchill, Lylliam Sekkat and Thomas Thorndike, addressed ethics in the food and beverage industry. Although they didn’t move on to the next round, their presentation was very strong, said Hudspeth, who described all 12 student participants as exceptional. “They’re really sophisticated and able students,’’ he said. “I loved the cohesiveness of the teams. They all worked exceptionally well together. The students across the MBA program are bright, wonderful, and such a pleasure to teach. You’ll never have a better group of students. They are the cream of the crop!’’

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