2017 Groat and Alpern Awards
The 2017 Groat and Alpern awards recipients have been announced. Francine Blau ’66 will receive the Judge William B. Groat Alumni Award and Joanne Restivo Jensen ’84 the Jerome Alpern Award on April 20 at The Pierre in New York City.
They were selected for the honors because of professional accomplishments and commitments to ILR and Cornell.
Blau is the Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at ILR and is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., a research fellow of IZA in Bonn, Germany, and the Center for Economic Studies/Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, Germany, and a research professor of DIW in Bonn, Germany.
She is the author or editor of eight books on gender issues in the labor market, and a book on U.S. labor market performance in an international perspective. Blau has authored some 100 academic papers covering such major social and economic issues as pay differentials, immigration, inequality, education, youth employment issues, marriage and collective bargaining.
She is a former president of the Labor and Employment Relations Association, the founding fellow of the Society of Labor Economists and received the IZA Prize for outstanding achievement in labor economics.
Jensen is a managing director and private banker at Deutsche Bank Wealth Management, where she provides financial strategies to some of the world’s wealthiest private investors, executives, entrepreneurs, real estate investors and private equity and hedge fund managers.
Prior to joining Deutsche Bank in 2009, Jensen was a managing director and private banker at Citi Private Bank. She began her 23-year career at Citi in the Consumer Banking Business, transitioning into Private Banking in 1989.
Since 2004, she has been featured as one of Worth® magazine’s “Top 100 Financial Advisors.” Barron’s also named her as one of their national “Top 100 Women Financial Advisors.”
Jensen has been active with the ILR School for many years and has served on the Dean’s Advisory Council since 2009. In 2015, she became the chair of the council. Over the past year, she has been a member of the school-wide strategic plan coordinating committee for the ILR strategic planning process.