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Eight New Faculty Join Nebraska Business

Eight New Faculty Join Nebraska Business
With expertise ranging from audit regulations to asset pricing, eight new faculty members joined the College of Business at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln this fall. Their combined years of teaching, research and industry experience help meet the needs of students due to years of enrollment growth, and also fulfill the college’s pursuit to create high impact research that informs important business questions of the day.

“Our new Nebraska Business faculty bring great energy with a combination of research expertise and real-world experience in their fields. Our students benefit from the continued growth and the excellent quality of our faculty,” said Dr. Kathy Farrell, James Jr. and Susan Stuart Endowed Dean of the College of Business.
 
These new faculty members will build upon a strong foundation of dedicated teachers and highly cited and published researchers:
 
Dr. Amy Bartels J.D., Assistant Professor of Management  
Dr. Amy Bartels earned her Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. She also earned her juris doctorate and master of arts in higher education administration from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her research interests include leadership and team dynamics, employee well-being and the interplay of emotions and stress within the workplace.  
 
Bartels’ dissertation is titled “The People’s Choice: Exploring the Role of Collective Endorsement in Dynamic Leadership Relationships.”
 
Dr. Dirk E. Black, Assistant Professor of Accountancy 
Dr. Dirk E. Black earned his Ph.D. in business administration with a specialization in accounting from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He also earned his master of accountancy at Brigham Young University and holds a CPA designation. Prior to Nebraska, he taught as an assistant professor of business administration in the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He worked as an audit associate for KPMG LLP in Birmingham, Alabama, before entering academia. His research interests include financial reporting and performance measurement and evaluation.
 
Black authored “Other Comprehensive Income: A Review and Directions for Future Research” in Accounting and Finance and co-authored “CEO Pay-for-Complexity and the Risk of Managerial Diversion from Multinational Diversification” in Contemporary Accounting Research and “Discussion of: Divestitures of Equity by Executives and Future Equity Granting Patterns” in the Journal of Management Accounting Research. His co-authored articles “Has the Regulation of Pro Forma Reporting in the U.S. Changed Investors’ Perceptions of Pro Forma Earnings Disclosures?” and “U.S. Managers’ Use of ‘Pro Forma’ Adjustments to Meet Strategic Earnings Targets” were both published in the Journal of Business Finance and Accounting. He and his co-authors received the Best Paper Award for “Do First Impressions Last? The Impact of Initial Assessments and Subsequent Performance on Promotion Decisions” at the 2017 AAA Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting. He also won the Best Third Year Doctoral Student Paper Award for “SFAS 123R and the CEO Contracting Use of Relative Performance Evaluation” at the 2012 AAA Southeast Regional Meeting.
 
Dr. Stuart Dearden, Assistant Professor of Accountancy 
Dr. Stuart Dearden earned his Ph.D. in accounting from The Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. He received his master of accountancy from the Brigham Young University Marriott School of Business and is a licensed certified public accountant. Before earning his Ph.D., he worked as an auditor for KPMG in Salt Lake City, advancing to the position of an audit manager. His research interests include audit quality, audit regulation and auditor judgment.

His paper “The Effect of Confirmation Bias on Auditors’ Risk Assessments: Archival Evidence,” received the 2017 AAA Southwest Regional Meeting Distinguished Paper Award. His dissertation is titled “Implications of Audit Office Resource Allocations Shocks: Evidence from Late 10-K Filings.”
 
Dr. Shivam Gupta, Assistant Professor of Supply Chain Management and Analytics
Dr. Shivam Gupta earned his Ph.D. in management science from the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. He also received his master of technology in civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India. Prior to Nebraska, he was an assistant professor in the McCoy College of Business at Texas State University, where he taught prescriptive analytics and business statistics. His research interests include designing sourcing strategies for procuring commodities where price is the primary concern, and specialized products – such as complex manufacturing equipment or infrastructural projects – where non-price factors (e.g., quality) become equally important. Often, his work falls at the interface of operations management and economics, where he employs economic modeling techniques as building blocks to study operations problems.  
 
He co-authored “Distressed Selling by Farmers: Model, Analysis and Use in Policy-Making” in Production and Operations Management, which received first place in the INFORMS Public Sector OR Best Paper Competition in 2015 and was a finalist in the POMS SCM Best Student Paper Competition in 2016. He also co-authored “Optimal Descending Mechanisms for Constrained Procurement” in Production and Operations Management.
 
Dr. Yingchao Lan, Assistant Professor of Supply Chain Management and Analytics
Dr. Yingchao Lan earned her Ph.D. in operations management from the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. She received both her master’s degree in management science and engineering and her bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Beihang University (previously known as Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics). Before earning her Ph.D., she acquired industry experience in Beijing while working at Mercer Human Resource Consulting LLC as a research associate, and later as a supply and demand system specialist for Lenovo Limited. 
 
Strongly associated with her industrial experience, her research interests lie in understanding the operational challenges and benefits associated with collaboration across organizational boundaries. She empirically examines these challenges in two contexts: health care delivery and new product development. She co-authored the forthcoming article “On the Inattention to Digital Confidentiality in Operations and Supply Chain Research” in Production and Operations Management. She received several awards including Best Student Paper Finalist Award in the Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM) Division of the Academy of Management (AOM), Institute for Supply Management Best Paper Finalist and Best Reviewer for AOM OSCM Division.
 
Dr. Ron Liu, Assistant Professor of Finance
Dr. Ron Liu earned his Ph.D. in finance from the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. His research interests are in asset pricing, on both market microstructure and cross-sectional expected equity returns.

Liu co-authored the forthcoming article “Signaling in OTC Markets: Benefits and Costs of Transparency” in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.

Kay Maresh J.D. Assistant Professor of Practice in Accountancy / Executive in Residence
Kay Maresh J.D., earned her juris doctorate from the College of Law at the University of Nebraska and her undergraduate degree from Colorado State University. She holds a CPA designation and serves as part-time director at HBE LLP. She previously worked as a tax managing director at Deloitte Tax LLP for 33 years. She began teaching at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2011 and held an adjunct appointment for six years before serving as a lecturer of accounting. Her area of expertise is corporate tax and tax policy.
 
Maresh received the Delta Sigma Pi Outstanding Professor Recognition in 2017. She served as a panelist on the Nebraska Educational Telecommunications television show, Tax Tips, and is currently on the Nebraska Society of Certified Public Accountants Continuing Education Committee. 
 
Dr. Yunxia (Peter) Zhu, Assistant Professor of Supply Chain Management and Analytics
Dr. Yunxia (Peter) Zhu earned his Ph.D. in operations management from the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. He also received a master of science in supply chain management from the University of Texas at Dallas and a master of science in supply chain management from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Prior to joining Nebraska, he taught operations management as a visiting assistant professor at Mays Business School at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, and later became an assistant professor of supply chain management at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Before earning his master’s degrees, he gained industry experience as a business analyst at Xindeco International Trade Company in Shanghai, China. His research interests include supply chain management, health care management and scheduling.
 
Zhu serves on the editorial review board of Production and Operations Management, which published three of his co-authored articles, including “Outpatient Appointment Block Scheduling Under Patient Heterogeneity and Patient No-Shows,” “A Review of Operational Issues in Managing Physical Currency Supply Chains” and “Managing Logistics in Regional Banknote Supply Chain under Security Concerns.” He also co-authored “Structural Search and Optimization in Social Networks” in INFORMS Journal on Computing and “Value of Local Cash Reuse: Inventory Models for Medium-Size Depository Institutions under the New Federal Reserve Policy” in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management.
Published: September 14, 2018