Recent Hires Contribute to Environment of Teaching Excellence Two full professors, including a provost's distinguished professor, are appointed, and ten other educators join them at The School of Management. by Jeanne Spreier Mike W. Peng, Ph.D., Provost's Distinguished Professor of Global Business Strategy Dr. Peng's research and interest in global strategy issues offer insight to western businesses and an opportunity to make The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) School of Management known throughout the world. In 2003, Dr. Peng was named recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award, formerly known as a Young Investigator Award. The 2005-2006 academic year is the third year of Dr. Peng's $423,000, five-year project. The best thing as far as UTD and The School of Management is concerned is that I am able to bring over $200,000 of funding to my new institution. This will help fund the next three years of my research at UTD, Dr. Peng says. That research, now more than 10 years in development, focuses on emerging economies. Dr. Peng says he noticed a tremendous disconnect between an explosive corporate interest in emerging economies, such as China, and a lack of academic interest in these important areas of the world. If business schools and faculties were to be relevant, Dr. Peng decided, they couldn't afford to ignore these important developments in the global economy. After receiving his doctorate in business administration and strategic management from the University of Washington, Dr. Peng taught at a number of schools, including the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Hawaii. Most recently, he was an associate professor at The Ohio State University. He joins The School of Management's Organizations, Strategy and International Management area and is teaching graduate-level classes in global strategy and strategic management. Harold H. Zhang, Ph.D. Dr. Zhang's research touches the lives of most people, with its emphasis on financial security. A full professor in The School of Management's Finance area, Dr. Zhang is especially interested in optimal investment and portfolio decisions of investors and the pricing of financial assets. His work was honored when he received, along with his research collaborators, the 2004 TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for outstanding scholarly writing on lifelong financial security. That was for an article on taxable and tax-deferred investment opportunities published in the June 2004 Journal of Finance. While his studies plumb topics that may not be common dinnertime conversation, the issues have real-world applications. My research with collaborators has addressed issues such as what are the optimal trading strategies in the presence of capital gains taxes and how to optimally locate and allocate an investor's savings in the presence of taxable and tax-deferred such as retirement accounts opportunities, he says. For many financial economists, important challenges come from trying to understand the consumption and investment behavior of investors and how the interactions of investors in financial markets form asset prices, says Dr. Zhang, who, like many at The School of Management (SOM), started his career as an engineer. He later received his doctorate degree in economics from Duke University. Dr. Zhang comes to UTD from the University of North Carolina, where he was an associate professor. He teaches doctorate and undergraduate level courses in investments. Dr. Zhang previously was awarded the Undergraduate Economics Teaching Award while at Carnegie Mellon University. David L. Deeds, Ph.D. Dr. Deeds looks to science to learn about business and has spent his career investigating the impact of science and research on society. He knows from a practical standpoint what he is talking about. In the mid-1980s, before earning his doctorate at the University of Washington in business policy, Dr. Deeds was co-founder and CEO of LightSpeed, an entrepreneurial venture specializing in the development, sales and support of computer-aided drafting and manufacturing systems. During his tenure, revenues grew from $29,000 to $1.1 million. His curiosity in commercialization of science remains. The challenge of understanding how new ventures, pharmaceutical companies and universities could work together to realize the value from the new understanding of biological process really spurred my research, he says. At his most recent position, at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Deeds helped create a nationally recognized program in bioscience entrepreneurship that crossed disciplinary boundaries. As an associate professor in SOM's Organizations, Strategy and International Management area, Dr. Deeds teaches an upper division undergraduate course in entrepreneurship, a graduate course in technology and innovation management and a doctoral seminar on empirical research. L’via Mark—czy, Ph.D. Dr. Mark—czy's research involves the fundamental issues of making good choices, with the goal of improving the assessment and evaluation skills of corporate decision makers. As an associate professor in SOM's Organizations, Strategy and International Management area, Dr. Mark—czy knows from her studies that alternatives can compete, such as when personal priorities diverge from the public good. I feel gratified that people often make decisions that are not in their rational self-interest yet are ethically the right decisions, she says. I am interested in understanding when people go with their self-interest or with the ethically right decision in situations when the two of these are in conflict. After receiving her doctorate in management from Cambridge University, Dr. Mark—czy worked as a research fellow at Cranfield University and most recently as associate professor of management at the University of California, Riverside. At UTD, she teaches an undergraduate course about the social and political environment of business. Alexander W. Butler, Ph.D. While Dr. Butler's area of research interest the intersection of corporate finance and financial institutions offers important lessons to large institutions, he also has been involved in improving the smaller organizations with which he has been affiliated. At the University of South Florida, where Dr. Butler's last appointment was as assistant professor of finance, he initiated structured cross-disciplinary interaction among junior faculty members in the business school. These regular but informal interactions led to collaborative research ventures across departments that would not have otherwise occurred, he says. At The School of Management, Dr. Butler, who received his doctorate in finance from the University of Indiana, joins the Finance area as an assistant professor. His research will focus primarily on the issuance, secondary market trading and retirement of corporate and government securities. He is teaching honors business finance at the undergraduate level and money and capital markets at the graduate level. Zhonglan (Di) Dai, Ph.D. Dr. Dai puts both her doctorate degrees to use as she pursues her research into CEO turnover and CEO compensation. In 1994, she received a doctorate in economics from Duke University and most recently earned another doctorate, this one in accounting from the University of North Carolina. At The School of Management, Dr. Dai serves as an assistant professor in the Accounting and Information Management area, where she teaches managerial accounting classes. A curiosity about how firing and compensation interact to provide optimal incentive for CEOs sparked her research, Dr. Dai says. She also is looking into what determines CEO tenure and how inside succession differs from outside succession. All this research has immediate applications for companies questioning CEO incentives. But despite all these high-profile professional issues and challenges, Dr. Dai says the greatest achievement of her past year was having my second child while finishing my dissertation. Volkan Muslu, Ph.D. Two areas of research interest Dr. Muslu, an assistant professor in the Accounting and Information Management area. The first is something many wonder about as they look over their latest brokerage mailings how much of the information in financial statements do investors understand. Specifically, I examine cash-flow implications of accruals and how they are reflected in the current stock prices, Dr. Muslu says. He says this research sheds light on the predictability or unpredictability of future security prices, which have puzzled the financial community for decades. In addition, he plans to work on corporate governance issues, especially in relation to executive compensation and boards of directors. It is Dr. Muslu's previous work as an analyst for a mergers-and-acquisitions consulting company that brought these two issues to the forefront. I realized the importance of financial statements for company valuation and negotiations. I also realized how companies altered and emphasized different aspects of governance mechanisms during different phases of their life cycle, he says. Dr. Muslu, who received his doctorate in accounting and control from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is teaching financial accounting classes to undergraduates and MBA students. Andrei Strijnev, Ph.D. Dr. Strijnev, an assistant professor in the Marketing area, studies the effects that consumer and corporate behavior have on each other. For him, something as simple as a quick trip to the grocery store can provide a Petri dish of decisions. Even if the stop is for nothing more than bread and milk, he is interested in which bread and which milk consumers may choose and whether they might also decide to buy some ice cream on the way out. I am particularly interested in uncovering relationships between multiple types of decisions that consumers or firms make, and understanding how consumer behavior affects firms' [behavior] and vice versa, says Dr. Strijnev, who studies consumer and corporate behavior using economics and Bayesian statistics and econometrics. He became interested in this field of inquiry in graduate school at Southern Illinois University. When I was in the MBA program, I remember one of the professors mentioning that two of the product categories that are most frequently purchased together in a grocery store are diapers and beer, which made me wonder whether this was something meaningful or purely coincidental, he says. Dr. Strijnev, who received his doctorate in marketing from Washington University in St. Louis, teaches an undergraduate marketing class and supervises independent studies of two students working on their doctorates in marketing. In the spring, he plans to teach two doctoral seminars, one in Bayesian econometrics and one in marketing. Alejandro Zentner, Ph.D. At UTD, Dr. Zentner plans to continue his research into the effects of file sharing on industries producing digital goods, including music, movies and software, a topic of huge interest to students on campuses here and across the nation. In 2000, when I started my [doctorate], file sharing was a popular activity among students with access to high-speed Internet connections, Dr. Zentner recalls. I thought about the potential effects on industries producing goods that were being shared online. He wonders if, in the long term, file sharing will eventually undermine intellectual property rights for digital goods and result in diminished artistic creations or fewer innovations. Dr. Zentner recently received his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago and joins the Finance and Managerial Economics area as an assistant professor. He teaches managerial economics to MBA students. Fang Wu, Ph.D. Dr. Wu joins The School of Management's Marketing area as a visiting assistant professor. But she is no stranger to Texas, having received her doctorate degree in marketing from The University of Texas at Austin in 2001. For the past four years, Dr. Wu served as an assistant professor in marketing at Michigan State University. Much of Dr. Wu's published writing has focused on e-business. Two years ago, she received an outstanding paper award from the Association for Business and Economics Research at the 2003 Global Conference on Business and Economics in London. While her research interests include the role of marketing knowledge in innovations, organizational learning, and knowledge management in international context, Dr. Wu also has a strong interest in what goes on in the classroom. My teaching philosophy is rooted in the belief that teaching is an ultimate form of learning, she says. Dr. Wu is teaching introduction to marketing, marketing research and marketing strategy to undergraduates. Yuanping Ying Ms. Ying is studying something that is all around us and how people react to it. Her research interest revolves around Internet marketing, specifically consumer behavior in online-shopping environments. She says her research helps online retailers gain an understanding of customers' shopping behaviors and gives those retailers practical insights into how they might better serve their customers. Ms. Ying is completing her Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Michigan, where she received the Milton G. and Josephine H. Kendrick Award in Marketing. She says her doctoral studies and the booming Internet economy both started at the same time. The Internet has presented marketing researchers numerous challenges and opportunities, she says. Internet marketing is a gold mine for me. As a visiting assistant professor in the Marketing area, Ms. Ying is teaching principles of marketing to undergraduate students. Robert L. Robb After 23 years of guiding, financing and running various start-up companies, Robert L. Robb will assist SOM students and staff as they explore both the academics of entrepreneurship and the practicalities of moving research-based innovations to the marketplace. Mr. Robb, who is helping in the development of a UTD entrepreneurship institute, received his master's degree in parasitology-microbiology from the University of Utah. Most recently, he was president and CEO of Quorex Pharmaceuticals, a venture-backed drug company that during his tenure moved from start-up to producing two new antibiotics in record time. Mr. Robb is a senior lecturer in SOM's Organizations, Strategy and International Management area as well as an adviser to UTD's Institute of Biomedical Science and Technology.