AICPA Special Recognition Award goes to diversity advocate.

Bernard J. Milano, a retired partner of KPMG LLP and current president of the KPMG Foundation and KPMG Disaster Relief Fund, has received the AICPA's Special Recognition Award for his work with the KPMG Foundation's PhD Project, which seeks to increase the number of minority faculty members in university business programs. He accepted the award at the annual meeting of the American Accounting Association in Washington, D.C.

During the 1990s, Milano was responsible for his firm's national college recruiting efforts. Recognizing that the profession had too few minority members, Milano, along with his partners on the KPMG Foundation Board, concluded that the most effective way to correct this deficiency was to increase the number of minority faculty members. This led to the 1994 establishment of The PhD Project, an award-winning program to increase diversity in America's business schools. The Project attracts African-, Hispanic- and Native Americans to business doctoral programs and provides a network of peer support through their Doctoral Student Associations in the following disciplines: accounting, finance, information systems, management and marketing. To date, corporate and academic sponsors--including the AICPA--have invested $17 million in The PhD Project.