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Twelve New Faculty Join Nebraska Business

Twelve New Faculty Join Nebraska Business
Dr. Shane Moser teaches business students in the new trading room.
With expertise ranging from strategic management to food and energy supply chains, 12 new faculty members joined the College of Business at the University of NebraskaLincoln this fall. Their combined years of teaching, research and industry experience help meet the needs of students due to accelerated enrollment growth and also fulfill the college’s mission to create high impact research that informs important business questions of the day.
 
“We are excited about our continued growth and the excellent quality of our Nebraska Business faculty. This year’s new faculty will bring a variety of research expertise and real-world experience that will benefit our students,” said Dr. Kathy Farrell, interim dean and State Farm Professor of Finance.
 
These new faculty members will build upon a strong foundation of dedicated teachers and highly cited and published researchers:
 
Dr. Wesley S. Boyce, Assistant Professor of Practice in Supply Chain Management and Analytics
Dr. Wesley S. Boyce earned his Ph.D. in business administration with an emphasis in logistics and supply chain management from the University of Missouri–St. Louis in 2014 and his MBA from Missouri State University in Springfield. Prior to Nebraska, he taught courses in operations, supply chain management and business analytics at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa. He also previously served as logistics program coordinator and assistant professor of logistics at Park University in Parkville, Missouri. Prior to earning his Ph.D., Boyce gained industry experience working in a project management role at Wells Fargo Advisors in St. Louis, Missouri. His research interests include a broad array of topics related to supply chain management and transportation, with specific interest on supply chain relationships and external costs of logistics.
 
His dissertation is titled “Supply Chain Relationships in Procurement: Is Collaboration Reality?”
 
Dr. Nikolaos Dimotakis, Assistant Professor of Management
Dr. Nikolaos Dimotakis earned his Ph.D. in management and his MBA from the Eli Broad Graduate School of Management at Michigan State University. Before joining Nebraska, he was an assistant professor of management at Georgia State University. His research interests include affective and motivational processes at work.
 
He co-authored more than 10 articles in journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and the Leadership Quarterly. His recent publications in the Journal of Applied Psychology include “Assessment Center Feedback and Future Feedback Seeking: Effects on Career Outcomes” and “Guilty and Helpful: An Emotion-Based Reparatory Model of Voluntary Work Behavior.” He and his co-authors won the Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership Best Leadership Paper Award for the article, “Leader Behavior and Ethical Culture Influences on Ethical Thought and Action” in the Academy of Management Journal. He serves on the editorial review boards of the Academy of Management Journal and the Journal of Applied Psychology. He also received the Faculty Recognition Award for Research from the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University in 2014.
 
Dr. Tawnya Means, Assistant Dean, Assistant Professor of Practice in Management and Director of the Teaching and Learning Center
Dr. Tawnya Means earned her Ph.D. in information science and learning technologies with a minor in information systems design from the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri in Columbia in 2009. She completed the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business Post-Doctoral Bridge program at the University of Florida in 2015. Prior to joining Nebraska, she spent ten years as the director for the Teaching and Learning Center at the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida. Her research interests include online and blended teaching and learning, technology for teaching, faculty preparation to teach and more.
 
Means contributed to four books, most recently Annals of Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy and Cases on Educational Technology Planning, Design and Implementation: A Project Management Perspective. Her dissertation is titled “Willingness to Return to Digital Learning Resources: Information Environments of Students Following Online Course Completion.” She was selected for the Superior Accomplishment Award in 2012 at the University of Florida.
 
Dr. Shane M. Moser, Assistant Professor of Practice in Finance
Dr. Shane M. Moser earned his Ph.D. in finance at the University of Kansas in 2010. He also received his master of science in statistics from Oregon State University and master of accounting and information systems from the University of Kansas School of Business. Before joining Nebraska, he was an assistant professor of finance at the Robert P. Stiller School of Business at Champlain College. He also spent five years in marketing at Sprint and Caterpillar and audit at Deloitte & Touche. His research interests include venture capital and corporate bonds.
 
Moser co-authored “What Does the Corporate Bond Market Know?” in The Financial Review and “Securities Lending Around Proxies: Is the Increase in Lending Due to Proxy Abuse or a Result of Dividends?” in the Journal of Financial Research. His dissertation is titled “Essays on Venture Capital Syndication and the Informational Efficiency of the Corporate Bond Market,” which earned him a Kauffman Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in 2008.
 
Dr. Laura Poppo, Professor of Management and Donald and Shirley Clifton Chair in Leadership
Dr. Laura Poppo earned her Ph.D. and master’s degree in organization and strategy from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to Nebraska, she was a professor of strategic management at the University of Kansas School of Business where she taught corporate strategy, strategic management and doctoral dissertation courses. Her research interests include corporate strategy.
 
She authored or co-authored numerous refereed book chapters and articles in journals such as the Journal of Management, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies and Organizational Science. Poppo serves as consulting editor in chief of the Journal of Trust Research and a member of the editorial boards for the Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science and Strategic Management Journal. She earned the Best Paper Award at the 2015 Strategic Management Society Conference for “Search Heuristics and Knowledge Work in B2B Exchanges: The Paths of Trust to Collaborative Innovations”. Poppo also received the Ph.D. mentor award from the Kansas School of Business four times between 2010 and 2016.
 
Dr. Blake A. Runnalls, Assistant Professor of Marketing
Dr. Blake A. Runnalls earned his Ph.D. in marketing from the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University in 2017. He also received his master of arts in economics from the University of South Florida and his MBA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He spent nearly five years working in industry for companies such as Progressive Insurance, Credit Suisse and General Electric. His research interests include personal selling and marketing management with a focus on sales training, organizational learning and the customer-firm interface.
 
His dissertation is titled “The Impact of Social Networks on Sales Training Transfer and Performance,” which won the 2017 American Marketing Association Sales SIG Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition. Runnalls also won the 2017 Organizational Frontlines Research Young Scholar Research Competition.
 
Dr. S. Sajeesh, Assistant Professor of Marketing
Dr. S. Sajeesh earned his Ph.D. in marketing and master of science in managerial science and applied economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining Nebraska, he was an assistant professor of marketing at Baruch College at the City University of New York. His research interests include marketing strategy, retailing, pricing and marketing research.
 
Sajeesh co-authored “A Model of Unorganized and Organized Retailing in Emerging Markets” in Marketing Science, “Strategic Revenue Sharing with Daily Deal Sites: A Competitive Analysis” in Decision Sciences, and “Positioning and Pricing in a Variety Seeking Market” in Management Science. He won the 2014 Baruch College Teaching Excellence Award.
 
Dr. Sunil K. Singh, Assistant Professor of Marketing
Dr. Sunil K. Singh earned his Ph.D. in marketing from the Robert J. Trulaske Sr. College of Business at the University of MissouriColumbia in 2017. He also received his MBA from the Xavier Labor Relation Institute in Jamshedpur, India. Prior to Nebraska, he was a visiting scholar in marketing at the University of Maryland. His research interests include marketing strategy implementation at customer-firm interface, interpersonal influence in selling and sales, and managing frontline service interactions.
 
Singh’s dissertation is titled “Email B2B Sales Negotiations: Dynamic Use of Textual Cues as Influence Tactics.”He received the 2017 OFR Symposium Young Scholar Award as well as won the Institute for the Study of Business Markets Dissertation Proposal Competition in 2015 and the 2015 AMA Sales SIG Dissertation Proposal Competition.
 
Dr. Erkut Sönmez, Assistant Professor of Supply Chain Management and Analytics
Dr. Erkut Sönmez earned his Ph.D. and master of science degrees in operations management from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining Nebraska, he was a visiting assistant professor of administrative sciences at Boston University’s Metropolitan College and as an assistant professor of operations management at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. His research interests include operations management applications in food and energy supply chains, sustainability and service and banking operations.
 
His publications in the European Journal of Operational Research include “A Comprehensive Annual Delivery Program for Upstream Liquefied Natural Gas Supply Chains” and “Strategic Analysis of Technology and Capacity Investments in the Liquefied Natural Gas Industry.” He also co-authored “An Analytical Throughput Approximation for Closed Fork/Join Networks” in INFORMS Journal on Computing and “Balancing Risk and Efficiency at a Major Commercial Bank” in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management. He serves as a reviewer for journals including Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management and IEE Transactions.
 
Dr. Todd A. Thornock, Assistant Professor of Accounting
Dr. Todd A. Thornock earned his Ph.D. and master of science in accounting from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. He also received a master of accountancy from Brigham Young University and holds CPA, CMA and CGMA designations. Prior to Nebraska, he was an assistant professor of accounting at Iowa State University. He worked as an audit associate for PricewaterhouseCoopers for four years and as a consultant for six years before entering academia. His research interests include reward system design, performance feedback, budgetary reporting, learning, goal setting and personality measures.
 
Thornock authored “How the Timing of Performance Feedback Impacts Individual Performance” in Accounting, Organizations and Society. He also co-authored “Who are You to Tell Me That?! The Moderating Effect of Performance Feedback Source and Psychological Entitlement on Individual Performance” in Journal of Management Accounting Research, “Communicated Values as Informal Controls: Gaining Accuracy While Undermining Productivity?” in Contemporary Accounting Research and “The Effects of Task Outcome Feedback and Broad Domain Evaluation Experience on the Use of Unique Scorecard Measures” in Advances in Accounting.
 
Dr. Jia (Joya) Yu, Assistant Professor of Management
Dr. Jia (Joya) Yu earned her Ph.D. in management and organizations from the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa in May 2017. She also received a master of science degree in employment relations and organizational behavior from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests include the intersection of teams, social networks/capital and leadership.
 
Most recently, she co-authored “The Condition 9 and 10 Tests of Model Confirmation: A Review of James, Mulaik, and Brett (1982) and Contemporary Alternatives” published in Organizational Research Methods. Yu’s publications in the Journal of Applied Psychology include “The Problem of Effect Size Heterogeneity in Meta-Analytic Structural Equation Modeling” and “Achieving More with Less: Extra Milers’ Behavioral Influences in Teams.” She also co-authored “The Relationship between Ethical Leadership and Unethical Pro-organizational Behavior: Linear or Curvilinear Effects?” in the Journal of Business Ethics. Her dissertation is titled “Social Network Perspective of Team Norm Enforcement.” She received the Best Student Paper Award in the Research Methods Division at the Academy of Management Conference and the T. Anne Cleary International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the University of Iowa in 2016.
 
Dr. Shengchao Zhuang, Assistant Professor of Actuarial Science
Dr. Shengchao Zhuang earned his Ph.D. at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2014. Before joining Nebraska, he served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo for three years. His research interests include optimal insurance/reinsurance, life insurance, portfolio selection, behavioral finance, and big data in finance and insurance.
 
Zhuang co-authored “Marginal Indemnification Function Formulation for Optimal Reinsurance” and “The Role of a Representative Reinsurer in Optimal Reinsurance” in Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, “Pricing in Reinsurance Bargaining with Comonotonic Additive Utility Functions” in ASTIN Bulletin, and “CDF Formulation for Solving an Optimal Reinsurance Problem” and “Optimal Insurance in the Presence of Reinsurance” in Scandinavian Actuarial Journal. He also serves as a referee for Review of Finance, Insurance: Mathematics and Economics and North American Actuarial Journal.
 
Arriola proposes to Springer after homecoming ceremonies.
(from left to right) top row: Poppo, Sajeesh, Thornock, Means, Singh, Runnalls; bottom row: Moser, Boyce, Zhuang, Yu, Sönmez, Dimotakis
Published: October 5, 2017