{"id":242047,"date":"2026-03-06T11:09:39","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T16:09:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=242047"},"modified":"2026-03-09T13:34:44","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T17:34:44","slug":"uconn-mba-students-among-the-elite-in-national-ethics-case-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2026\/03\/uconn-mba-students-among-the-elite-in-national-ethics-case-competition\/","title":{"rendered":"UConn MBA Students Among the Elite in National Ethics Case Competition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to remove numerical results from the first round of the NECC competition.<\/em><\/p>\n

Two teams of UConn MBA candidates are among an elite group of students advancing in the highly competitive National Ethics Case Competition.<\/p>\n

The teams\u2014that tackled ethics in the pharmaceutical industry and in artificial intelligence\u2014are among a fraction of the entrants to advance to Round 2 in the competition. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis project was very ambitious for them. They all have important jobs with big responsibilities in defense, hospital tech, administration and more,\u2019\u2019 said business law professor Stephen Hudspeth, who encouraged his graduate students to participate.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u2019\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Turning Ethical Ideas Into Executive Decision-Making in Pharmaceuticals<\/h2>\n

\u201cThis experience has reinforced for me that the hardest ethical decisions are rarely \u2018right vs. wrong.\u2019 They are tradeoffs between competing duties that all matter, made under real constraints like patient access, evidence integrity, and long-term viability,\u2019\u2019 said Kwenyerechi \u201cPromise\u2019\u2019 Onuorah. Her teammates included Ryan Emerson, Josie-Ryan-Small and Willian Tellini.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat challenged me most was translating ethical ideals into an executive-level decision process that a board could actually use,\u2019\u2019 she said. \u201cBuilding 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.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

The team\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The competition judges deemed the paper among the Top Four and it will be published in a national journal after the competition ends. The other three top teams hailed from Cornell, Notre Dame and Utah. The four papers were selected based on \u201cthe depth of reasoning, clarity, and a strong engagement with complex ethical questions.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Another Team Addressed Ethics of Artificial Intelligence<\/h2>\n

Another UConn team also impressed the judges and is moving on to the next level of competition.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur group selected AI as our industry because it is becoming the defining technology of our generation,\u2019\u2019 said Navdeep Singh. \u201cThe 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.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Singh\u2019s teammates included Zayne Olsen, Brandon Kramp and Vanna Patel.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 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,\u2019\u2019 Singh said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u2019\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n

Top Team Will Be Awarded $120,000<\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.
\nIn 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t move on to the next round, their presentation was very strong, said Hudspeth, who described all 12 student participants as exceptional.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re really sophisticated and able students,\u2019\u2019 he said. \u201cI 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\u2019ll never have a better group of students. They are the cream of the crop!\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018They Are the Cream of the Crop!\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":242048,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1862],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2105],"class_list":["post-242047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-busn"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-04 10:54:13","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/121"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242047"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":242172,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242047\/revisions\/242172"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/242048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242047"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=242047"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=242047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}