Helen van der Sluis, assistant professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh School of Business, has been named the 2025 winner of the Ferber Award for her article, “How Do Physical Disability Cues Influence Assumptions about Consumer Tastes? Unpacking the Disability Preference Stereotype,” published in the February 2025 issue (Volume 51) of the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR).
Van der Sluis’s award-winning research examines how physical disability cues influence assumptions about consumers’ preferences, challenging stereotypes that can shape marketplace experiences and perceptions. Her work sheds light on the broader implications of disability representation in marketing and consumer contexts.
The Ferber Award recognizes the best dissertation-based article published in the most recent volume of JCR. It is named in honor of Robert Ferber, one of the journal’s founders and its second editor. The winner is selected through a competitive, multi-stage process in which members of the journal’s Editorial Review Board and associate editors nominate top articles. A panel of three distinguished consumer researchers then evaluates the finalists based on their interdisciplinary orientation, contribution to knowledge, organization, and readability.
She researched how social factors such as disability and gender both shape and are shaped by the marketplace, and the resulting consequences for consumers, marketers, and policymakers. Before joining Pitt’s School of Business, van der Sluis was an assistant professor of marketing at the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business. She currently teaches marketing research at Pitt. In this Faculty Research Spotlight, she explains her motivation for researching this topic and her key findings.