The PhD Project might not exist today.

Without Bob Elliott, The PhD Project might not exist today.

Bob’s passion for advancing diversity in the accounting industry came as no surprise to the people who knew and loved the visionary leader who passed away in November 2022. According to his wife, Lee, one of Bob’s former KPMG colleagues told her: “The immensity of Bob’s generosity of spirit, humanity, renaissance-like brilliance and his exportation of it to the development of others demonstrated his own guiding moral principles. For Bob, human connections mattered most. He established this in The PhD Project, which speaks to the human side and the character of a man who was an unassuming polymath.”

Before he helped spark The PhD Project, Bob built a reputation in the accounting industry through leadership roles with KPMG, American Accounting Association (AAA) and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) as well as through the expertise he lent to essential and widely read industry reports. He became a strong advocate for modernizing the field of accountancy and was ultimately recognized with some of the industry’s top accolades, culminating in his nomination to the AAA’s Accounting Hall of Fame.

A colleague recalls, “Bob was not only creative and imaginative, he was also prescient and tireless in exploring opportunities that could allow the profession to be more constructive and responsible beyond its traditional role in financial reporting.”

As his career progressed, Bob started thinking about the interrelated issues of global competitiveness and diversity in business as well as access to education and educators as role models for historically underrepresented minorities. “After researching the issue, he realized that while African American youngsters might see African American teachers, lawyers and doctors in their communities, they weren’t seeing Black CPAs,” his wife Lee said.

In fact, at the time, 12% of the U.S. population was African American, yet only 1% of CPAs were; at the same time, Bob discovered, 4% of doctors were Black. “With no disrespect to my profession,” he once told AAA, “it is a lot harder to become a doctor than a CPA… surely we can do better than 1%.”

So in 1992, when AAA honored Bob with the Wildman Medal Award – which recognizes leaders who advance theory and practice in the accounting profession – he decided to do something a little different with the $2,500 cash prize. He wanted to put it toward creating a solution to the industry’s diversity problem.

Bob’s vision attracted support and grew the original $2,500 to $40,000 thanks to contributions from KPMG and AICPA. That original funding helped create fellowships for minority accounting doctoral students. Then, the KPMG Foundation, which had embraced Bob’s vision, took it a step further by funding a new initiative – called The PhD Project, helmed by Bob’s colleague and collaborator Bernie Milano.

From its inception, The PhD Project has focused on supporting members across all business disciplines. Initially, its doctoral student associations concentrated on accounting, later expanding to include information systems in 1996, followed by finance, management, and marketing in 1997. This growth has enabled members to become mentors and role models for historically underrepresented students in a wide array of business fields.

In the 30 years since The PhD Project’s founding, Bob Elliott’s vision has helped more than sextuple the number of minority business PhDs in the United States – from 294 in 1994 to more than 1,700 in 2024. That means millions of college students across the United States have learned from PhD Project members. And that makes Bob Elliott the very definition of a trailblazer.