By Nathaniel Luce
Every school year brings dozens of new faces to Management Hall, but this year, students will find some new ones at the front of the classroom.
Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management has added seven new full-time faculty members, including four female professors. “This has been a spectacular year of faculty recruiting,” said M. Eric Johnson, Ralph Owen Dean. “It represents one of the biggest recruiting years in our history, as we build upon the legacy of retiring faculty and execute our growth strategy.”
Spanning every level of seniority, the new faculty’s research areas include Accounting, Finance, Marketing, Operations, and Organization Studies. Their scholarship and research interests will enhance several areas of study at Owen, including Venture & Entrepreneurial Finance, Big Data, Marketing Analytics, and Diversity & Inclusion.
ACCOUNTING
Rita Gunn, Assistant Professor of Accounting, earned her PhD in Accounting from Northwestern University in 2017. Her research interests include mergers and acquisitions (M&A), corporate restructurings, and financial reporting. Her recent studies have focused on corporate inversions: the relocation of corporate tax domiciles from the US to a foreign country. She will teach “Essentials of Financial Reporting” in the Vanderbilt undergraduate business minor.
FINANCE
Peter Haslag, Assistant Professor of Finance, earned his PhD in Finance from Washington University in St. Louis in 2017 and his M.S.F. from Owen in 2011. His research interests include financial markets and empirical corporate finance. Findings from his dissertation show that financing frictions affect how firms invest and can impede the reallocation of assets to efficient users, acting as a detriment to shareholders. He will teach “Principles of Finance” in the Vanderbilt undergraduate business minor.
Berk Sensoy, Hans Stoll Professor of Finance, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Finance in 2006 and has taught at USC, Duke, and Ohio State University. His research interests include private equity, hedge funds, and asset management. His research on the private equity market has provided insights on corporate control and organizational design. He will teach “Investments” and “Entrepreneurial Finance” in the MBA program.
Joshua T. White, Assistant Professor of Finance, earned his PhD in Finance from the University of Tennessee in 2012. Josh began his post-graduate career at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where he maintains a consulting role. Josh’s research focuses on the role of securities regulation and disclosure in addressing information asymmetries and agency or moral hazard problems between capital market participants. He will teach “Corporate Financial Policy” in the MBA program and “Managerial Finance” in the EMBA and MMHC programs.
MARKETING
Kelly Goldsmith, Associate Professor of Marketing, earned her PhD in Marketing from Yale University in 2009. Kelly joins Owen from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Her research interests include consumer response to risk and uncertainty, goals and consumer behavior, behavioral decision theory, and construal level theory. Her scholarship draws on and extends aspects of behavior decision theory, in showing that consumers can behave in ways counter to normative predictions and demonstrates when and why consumers do so. She will teach “Quantitative Analysis for Marketing Decision Making” and “Marketing Strategy” in the MBA program.
OPERATIONS
Kejia Hu, Assistant Professor of Operations, earned her PhD in Operations from Northwestern University in 2017. Her research interests include empirical operations management, structural modeling and causal inference, service operations, sustainability management, and statistics and stochastic modeling. Her scholarship investigates consumer retrial by connecting customers’ decisions with their preferences on service aspects: the speed in service access and quality in service delivered. She also studies product life cycle (PLC) curves from historical demand data for use in forecasting demand of ready-to-launch new products. She will teach “Management of Service Operations” in the MBA program and “Managerial Operations” in the Vanderbilt undergraduate business minor.
ORGANIZATION STUDIES
Melissa Thomas-Hunt, Professor of Management, earned her PhD in Organization Behavior from Northwestern University in 1997. She will serve as the Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence, a full-time administrative position. She has authored influential papers in several streams of scholarship; looking at how different people within a team can influence group decisions; investigating the effect of non-performance based employee characteristics on how their work is assessed within organizations; and exploring the male-female differences in influence within teams. Her earliest work was on negotiation, addressing how negotiators process data during the negotiation process.
