Twelve new faculty members across seven departments will join the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin–Madison this fall, bringing research and teaching expertise to high-demand fields in the areas of finance, investment, and banking; operations and information management; accounting and information systems; marketing; management and human resources; risk and insurance; and real estate and urban land economics. In addition to their work with WSB, eight of the faculty members are part of UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Research, Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) Initiative. RISE was created to address today’s most pressing problems in Wisconsin and around the globe: RISE-AI is dedicated to artificial intelligence, RISE-EARTH focuses on sustainability, and RISE-THRIVE examines human health and wellbeing. WSB’s RISE hires are members of RISE-AI and RISE-EARTH. In addition to their work at WSB, these faculty will contribute to cross-campus conversations and scholarship in these topics.
The new faculty reflect WSB’s investment in scholarly and teaching excellence. Since 2021, 43 new faculty members have joined the school, bringing the total to 102.
“This is an exciting time for us at WSB,” says Nicholas Petruzzi, senior associate dean for faculty and staff and the Michael E. Lehman Distinguished Chair in Business in the Department of Operations and Information Management. “As faculty, each one of us brings a unique talent and perspective, and ultimately, our students are major stakeholders of that breadth and depth of talent. We feel fortunate to welcome this next generation of scholars to lead us into the new age of discovery.”
WSB extends a warm welcome to the following new faculty:
Associate professor of finance, investment, and banking
Scott Baker was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, when an economics professor changed the trajectory of his life.
“He showed me that economics can be far from a ‘dismal science,’ and that understanding economics and finance can help illuminate the world that we live in and allow us to better understand the choices made by people, by firms, and by governments,” says Baker, who earned a bachelor of arts degree in economics and a bachelor of arts degree in political science from Berkeley before earning his master’s degree and doctorate in economics at Stanford University. “He was a very passionate teacher, and worked to encourage students to understand economic theory but also to understand the more human context that it existed in.”
Baker was previously an associate professor of finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. His research focuses on empirical household finance and empirical macroeconomics. He is currently a research fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Assistant professor of operations and information management
Yu Ma’s research centers on leveraging AI methodologies to address significant problems in health care, examining both operational efficiency and clinical decision-making. Named a Takeda Fellow by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) School of Engineering, her work integrates machine learning, optimization, and advanced analytics.
“In the area of AI in health care, where progress in both predictive and generative AI is reshaping our current care delivery experience, it becomes increasingly important to understand how such systems should be integrated into the entire decision flow to ensure desired outcomes,” says Ma. “This involves an integrative approach of both learning and decision-making in a unified setting or potential for joint optimization approaches where we can aim to factor user behaviors and ad-hoc AI failures to better understand such human-AI interfaces on a system level.”
She earned a bachelor of arts in applied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned her doctorate in operations research at MIT’s Operations Research Center.
Ma will join UW–Madison’s RISE–AI Initiative.
Assistant professor of finance, investment, and banking
Zhongtian Chen earned a master of arts in economics from Duke University, a master of science in finance from Remin University of China, and a doctorate in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His research explores the intersection of asset pricing, machine learning, and behavioral finance, with a focus on understanding belief formation and investor behavior.
“Machine learning is rapidly transforming the field of finance by offering powerful tools for prediction. This is especially exciting in asset pricing, where better predictions can lead to better investment outcomes,” Chen says. “But as a financial economist, I believe one of the most important and challenging questions is: What is the economic intuition behind these models? In other words, what is inside the ‘black box?’”
Chen will join UW–Madison’s RISE–AI Initiative.
Associate professor of risk and insurance
Prior to arriving at WSB, Benjamin Collier served as an associate professor with the Department of Risk, Actuarial Science, and Legal Studies at Temple University’s Fox Business School.
Collier’s research agenda focuses on sustainability and climate risk, examining how businesses and households financially manage hurricanes, severe storms, and other natural disasters. His work has been featured in major media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Harvard Business Review.
How insurance markets respond to growing climate risk is the key question, says Collier, who will join UW–Madison’s RISE–Earth Initiative.
“Insurance has the potential to play a critical role in climate adaptation … While climate change heightens the need for insurance, both demand- and supply-side challenges are contributing to a troubling decline in coverage,” he says. “My research is part of a field trying to understand these dynamics and how insurance markets and public policies can be structured to facilitate climate resilience.”
Collier holds master of science degrees in psychology and economics and a doctorate in agricultural economics, all from the University of Kentucky.
Assistant professor of management and human resources
Jingya You holds a bachelor of arts in construction engineering and an master of arts in management science and engineering, both from Tianjin University in China. She holds a doctorate in strategy and entrepreneurship from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
You’s research explores scalability and scaling in digital firms, with a focus on how they navigate scalability constraints and manage strategic trade-offs inherent in the scaling process.
“One of the most compelling questions in strategy and entrepreneurship research is how firms can scale effectively over time,” You says. “This question has become even more important as firms increasingly adopt highly scalable digital technologies, such as AI algorithms, cloud computing, and platform-based infrastructures. My research seeks to enhance our understanding of firm scaling by examining how digital firms respond to variations in the inherent scalability of their businesses and the performance implications of these strategic responses.”
Assistant professor of risk and insurance
Kyohei Okumura’s research lies at the intersection of economic theory and computer science, with a focus on AI and data-driven systems. His work examines tradeoffs in algorithmic fairness—a critical area for thought leadership in insurance, actuarial science, and business applications of AI models—the sustainability of blockchain consensus mechanisms, and solutions for geographic disparities in medical residency allocation.
“My research is motivated by real-world challenges and aims to inform better public policy,” says Okumura. “Whether addressing algorithmic bias or improving the geographic allocation of medical residents, I seek to develop tools and insights that help practitioners, policymakers, and institutions make more equitable and effective decisions.”
He earned both his bachelor of arts and master of arts in economics from the University of Tokyo, and a master of arts and doctorate in economics from Northwestern University.
Okumura will be part of UW–Madison’s RISE–AI Initiative.
Assistant professor of management and human resources
Michael Kardas joins WSB from Oklahoma State University, where he served as an assistant professor of management at the Spears School of Business.
Kardas’ research focuses on conversation, social connection, and the ways in which people misunderstand themselves and others in organizations and in daily life. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the Einhorn-Hogarth New Investigator Award from the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and the Richard W. Poole Research Excellence Award from Oklahoma State University.
Kardas earned a bachelor of arts in psychology and applied mathematics from Brown University and his doctorate in behavioral science from the University of Chicago.
Assistant professor of marketing
Kyeongbin Kim’s research has developed around two areas: statistically oriented work developing and applying machine learning and AI methods for consumer insights and valuation, and causal-oriented work utilizing econometric methods for marketing-relevant policy evaluation. Her work is grounded in interests such as privacy, customer relationship management, and data-centric AI.
“One of the most exciting and difficult questions in my field is how can we fuse theoretical insight, AI/machine learning capabilities, and real-world practice to build business technologies that are not only powerful but also reliable and socially aligned?” says Kim. “We’re clearly in the steepest part of the AI development curve, but the progress is uneven. I believe theory and domain knowledge from business and social sciences can guide AI toward more trustworthy and actionable outcomes. I aim to reach that intersection of theory, technology, and real use cases to create tools that both perform and make sense to the people using them.”
She earned a bachelor of arts in economics and a master of arts in statistics from Yonsei University in Korea, and her doctorate in marketing from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.
Kim will join UW–Madison’s RISE–AI Initiative.
Assistant professor of accounting
Prior to joining WSB, Christian Peters served as an assistant professor in the Division of Accounting at Singapore’s Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University. He received his doctorate in accounting from Tilburg University in the Netherlands.
Peters’ research interests center on the judgment and decision-making of auditing professionals, where he specifically focuses on how emerging technologies, such as generative AI can be embedded into audit firms. As a secondary research interest, Peters explores the disclosures on and consequences of corporate tax avoidance.
“The question that currently excites me the most is how emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, can help us improve financial statement auditing,” Peters says. “I do believe these tools can be powerful and ultimately assist in improving audit quality and efficiency. I am mostly interested in how auditors can effectively use these tools, and I see that many audit firms are struggling with this.”
Peters will join UW–Madison’s RISE–AI Initiative.
Assistant professor of management and human resources
As a researcher, Jong Sig Chung examines how new technologies—such as platforms and advanced algorithms—are transforming human interaction and collaboration.
“Human collaboration is at the heart of innovation in organizations,” says Chung. “As advanced algorithms, including AI, take over tasks once performed by humans—even elements of collaboration—they create uncertainty about how these technologies will ultimately redefine collaboration and the innovation it enables.”
To explore this phenomenon, he analyzes large-scale digital trace data from platforms such as GitHub and Instagram, integrating these analyses with insights from organizational theory.
Chung will be part of UW–Madison’s RISE–AI Initiative.
He holds a bachelor of business administration from South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University and a doctorate in management from the University of Texas at Austin.
Associate professor of finance, investment, and banking
William Diamond earned a bachelor of arts in economics and mathematics from Yale University, and his doctorate in business economics from Harvard University. Prior to joining WSB, he was an assistant professor of finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Diamond’s research interests include asset pricing, banking, and housing. His work examines “how financial institutions create safe, money-like assets by making risky investments and how this exposes the financial system to crises,” he says. “My research examines both how financial regulation can prevent financial crises and how fiscal and monetary stimulus can mitigate the recessions that occur after crises.”
Abdollah Farhoodi
Assistant professor of real estate and urban land economics
“One of the most exciting questions in economics for me today is how to effectively combine structural economic models with modern AI tools,” says Abdollah Farhoodi, who joins WSB from the University of Toronto, where he was an assistant professor of economics. “The challenge that I find most exciting is integrating two approaches: using AI to enhance the flexibility and predictive accuracy of structural models while keeping the interpretability and policy relevance of economic theory.”
His research focuses on applied microeconomics, particularly at the intersection of urban economics and industrial organization. His work addresses pressing topics—such as housing affordability, migration, welfare distribution, and the influence of digital platforms—through the application of structural estimation, big data, and AI and causal machine learning.
Farhoodi earned a bachelor of science in electrical engineering and a master of science in economics from the University of Tehran and Sharif University of Technology in Iran, and earned his doctorate in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Farhoodi will join UW–Madison’s RISE–AI Initiative.
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