Introducing new faculty members

The following are among the new faculty members at Washington University. Others will be introduced periodically.

CullenJoseph Cullen, PhD, joins Olin School of Business as assistant professor of economics. Cullen earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Arizona in 2009. Before coming to Olin, Cullen was a fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Cullen studies the interaction between government regulation, business decisions and the environment. His research interests include industrial organization, environmental economics, energy and applied econometrics. Cullen recently was awarded the Public Utility Research Prize for the best paper in regulatory economics accepted for presentation at the International Industrial Organization Conference.

FarahatAmr Farahat, PhD, joins Olin Business School as assistant professor of operations and manufacturing management. He earned a doctorate in operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004. Before coming to Olin, Farahat was a faculty member at Cornell University. He develops mathematical models to study the interaction of pricing and inventory decisions in supply chains. His focus is on differentiated product models that capture product substitution patterns due to pricing and stockouts. In 2009, Farahat won first place in the Case and Teaching Material Competition/INFORMS for his study of flight delays at RegionEx, a small regional airline.

HernandezExequiel Hernández, PhD, joins Olin Business School as assistant professor of strategy after earning a doctorate in strategic management and organization from the University of Minnesota, where he also taught business policy to undergraduates. His research interests include strategy, interfirm networks and social capital, and international business. A paper he wrote based on his dissertation, “Immigrant Agglomeration, Firm Heterogeneity, and FDI Location Choice: Evidence from the United States,” won the Best PhD Student Paper and Best Practical Implications awards and was one of 10 finalists for Best Paper in the 2009 Strategic Management Society Conference in Washington, D.C.

JiangBaojun Jiang, PhD, joins Olin Business School as assistant professor of marketing after earning a doctorate in information systems from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include competitive strategy, platforms, user-generated content, e-commerce, technology-enabled markets, pricing and game theory. This year, he was awarded the Carnegie Mellon University Gerald L. Thompson Doctoral Dissertation Award in Management Science. In 2010, he won the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science ISMS Doctoral Dissertation Award for his paper “Strategic Analyses of User Generated Contents and Platforms.”

LeiserPing C. Lieser, PhD, joins the Program in Occupational Therapy as educational technology coordinator. Lieser earned a doctorate from Kansas State University, where she specialized in educational computing, design and online learning. She was an instructional designer at the University of Chicago and Missouri State University and has more than 10 years experience in the field of educational technology, training, consulting and e-learning design. Her specialties are online course design and development (especially with technical content), learning management systems (Blackboard, Moodle and Joomla), web design and multimedia development.

ManelaAsaf Manela, PhD, joins Olin Business School as assistant professor of finance after earning a doctorate in finance from the University of Chicago. Before coming to Olin, Manela worked as a software engineer at Mercury Interactive. His research interests include asset pricing; information acquisition and diffusion in financial markets; and the role of the media in finance, learning and portfolio choice. Manela won the 2010-11 Fishcer Black Fellowship from the American Finance Association. The award, named in honor of economist Fischer Black, recognizes an outstanding young academic whose original research has made a significant contribution to the field of finance.

RinggenbergMatthew Ringgenberg, PhD, joins Olin Business School as assistant professor of finance after earning a doctorate in finance from the University of North Carolina. Before coming to Olin, Ringgenberg worked at Charles River Associates and AnchorBank. His research interests include empirical asset pricing, equity lending, information economics and short selling. This year, he was awarded the M. Wayne DeLozier Award from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina. His research on equity lending and short selling examines the causes and results of short sale constraints in opaque markets in order to understand how and when short sale constraints arise.

SterlingAdina Sterling, PhD, joins Olin Business School as assistant professor of strategy after earning a doctorate in organization and management from Emory University. Before coming to Olin, Sterling worked on global brands in research and development at Procter & Gamble and taught “Leading and Managing Change” as a teaching assistant. Her research focuses on social structures in labor and product markets. Specifically, she focuses on how individuals and firms acquire social capital and the consequences this has on personnel selection, mobility and entrepreneurial success. In addition, she studies the influence of social capital in market-mediated employment arrangements, such as temporary and contractual work, and the influence this has on employer-employee matching.