Freeman welcomes six new tenured/tenure-track professors

The Freeman School has added six new tenured and tenure-track professors to its faculty for 2012-13.

Of the six appointments, three are for newly created positions, representing the first phase of an ambitious three-year faculty hiring plan initiated last year that will increase the size of the Freeman School’s research-active faculty by almost 40 percent.

“Our faculty expansion plan is off to an auspicious start with the hiring of this outstanding group of scholars,” said Freeman School Dean Ira Solomon. “Enhancing the academic reputation of the Freeman School is an essential part of our strategic plan, and these exceptional young teachers and researchers will contribute greatly to that effort.”

The new faculty members are Jasmijn Bol, associate professor of accounting; Zhenhua Chen, assistant professor of accounting; Kris Hoang, assistant professor of accounting; Xuhui “Nick” Pan, assistant professor of finance; Robert Prilmeier, assistant professor of finance; and Padmakumar Sivadasan, assistant professor of accounting.

Bol comes to the Freeman School from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she served as an assistant professor of accountancy. Bol’s research focuses on managerial accounting, and during her time at the University of Illinois, she authored or co-authored several articles that appeared in prestigious scholarly journals and earned awards for her teaching and research. Among these awards was her recognition as the Best Early-Career Researcher in Management Accounting by the American Accounting Association. Bol received a Master of Science in international business in 2002 from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and a PhD in management in 2007 from Spain’s IESE Business School.

Chen earned a BA in economics from Fudan University, an MA in economics from State University of New York and an MS in accounting from Suffolk University, and he expects to receive a PhD in accounting from Duke University in 2012. Chen’s research focuses on understanding the economic and behavioral processes that shape management communication of financial information. In his dissertation, Chen studied the internal and external attributions of managers during earnings conference calls.

Hoang received a BA and a Master of Accounting from the University of Waterloo, and she expects to receive a PhD in accounting in 2012 from the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on the judgment and decision-making behavior of accounting professionals, audit committees, and executives in corporate governance and audit settings. Hoang’s dissertation examined the psychology and economics of auditor-client relationships, and she has presented her papers at several international conferences.

Pan received a BS from Nanjing University and an MS from Peking University, and he expects to receive a PhD in finance from McGill University in 2012. Pan’s research focuses on asset pricing, commodities, credit risk, derivatives and risk management, and his paper “The Cross-Section of Recovery Rates and Default Probabilities Implied by Credit Default Swaps” is currently under review — revise and resubmit — at the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.

Prilmeier received a Diplom in business administration from European Business School in Oestrich-Winkel, Germany, and he expects to earn a PhD in finance in 2013 from the Ohio State University. His research interests include corporate finance, debt contracting and financial intermediation. Prilmeier is co-author of “This Time Is the Same: Using Bank Performance in 1998 to Explain Bank Performance During the Recent Financial Crisis,” which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Finance.

Sivadasan earned an MS from the University of North Texas and received a PhD in accountancy in 2010 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has served as a visiting assistant professor of accountancy for the past two years. Sivadasan co-authored “The Regulation of Public Company Auditing: Evidence from the Transition to AS5,” which was published in 2010 in the Journal of Accounting Research. His research interests include audit markets and financial reporting.

In addition to the six tenured and tenure-track professors, the Freeman School also named 11 faculty members to one-year appointments as visiting professors. Those new faculty members include Sharon Brown-Hruska, visiting professor of finance; Kenneth Carroll, visiting lecturer in finance; Cristina Danciulescu, visiting assistant professor of finance; Quoc Hoang, lecturer in accounting; Feng Jiang, visiting assistant professor of finance; Larry Leblanc, visiting lecturer in management; Jung Hoon Lee, visiting assistant professor of finance; Beatriz Pereira, lecturer in marketing; Ambika Prasad, visiting lecturer in marketing; Geoffrey Smith, visiting assistant professor of finance; and Hasan Zafer Yuksel, visiting assistant professor of finance.