New Faculty Class Brings Vast Knowledge Base to Babson
The 2022–2023 academic year marks an important milestone for Babson College. With 19 new faculty members, the College sees its largest hiring class in a single year. Their work stretches across eight of the 10 academic divisions and demonstrates the breadth of expertise—from philosophers to actuaries to marketing consultants to U.S. Coast Guard commanders—found in Babson’s classrooms.
This new cohort—including full-time faculty members and visiting professors—brings the total to more than 200 faculty members teaching, mentoring, and guiding undergraduate and graduate students as they navigate Babson and the professional world. The new faculty’s vast careers, education, and interests will help shape the College over the next decade and beyond.
Keeping an Eye Toward Current Events
One of the best things about a Babson education is how applicable the classroom work is to the real world. Each Babson faculty member has the knowledge and experience to help students address the concerns of today.
Recent supply chain issues have plagued various industries, from big-box stores to furniture to groceries, leaving businesses and consumers at a loss. As a supply chain expert, Assistant Professor (Operations and Information Management) Emily Griffin’s research answers questions about inventory and pricing decisions and analyzes wildlife trafficking supply chains. She even worked as a textile manufacturer while completing her post-graduate work.
A pillar of a Babson education is the emphasis on finding strategic, fruitful solutions to the climate crisis. Enter Assistant Teaching Professor Vivian Leung, a geologist whose research focuses on the intersection of channel dynamics, river restoration, and ecology. Before she joined Babson’s Mathematics, Analytics, Science, and Technology (MAST) Division, Leung worked for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, studying the interactions between the Elwha River dam removals, wood debris, and salmon habitat.
As an interdisciplinary English scholar, Assistant Teaching Professor (Arts & Humanities) Samantha Wallace’s work pertains to representations of sexual and gender-based violence in feminist theory and media and the complexities of those representations. At Babson, she will bring these ideas to multimedia-based courses about gender and literature, research, and global cultural studies.
Finding Innovative Ways to Teach …
The Babson curriculum, with its blend of business fundamentals and the liberal arts and sciences, is a specialized way to get a business degree. With that comes faculty ready to find new perspectives on teaching, learning, and society in general.
Assistant Professor of Practice in Organizational Behavior (Management) Jessica Burkland has been looking for innovative training and teaching methodologies for students, young professionals, and businesses throughout her academic career by leading seminars on digital learning and annual entrepreneurship conferences. Additionally, she is the owner of Activate Consulting and Training, where she works with mid-sized business owners to create strategy-focused training programs for managers and employees.
An entrepreneurially minded accountant, Visiting Assistant Professor of Practice (Accounting & Law) Kim Silva has been finding ways to innovate in her beloved field. She provides accounting guidance to nonprofits and small businesses with a specialization in fraud consulting. As a way of expanding access to accounting education, she also offers CPA-prep services to companies and individuals.
… And to Use Data
When looking at trends in society and business, Visiting Assistant Professor (MAST) Zefeng Bai looks first at the data to explain it. His research has found applications in asset management, behavioral finance, religion, and public health, including his recent dissertation that looks to improve pension plans for the increasingly aging global population.
Assistant Professor (Accounting) Cristina Alberti wants to bring more data analysis to auditing. She previously worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and wrote a dissertation on responses from auditors to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Part of being an excellent marketer is understanding how people think and why they make certain decisions. Associate Professor Ellie Kyung, who used to be a marketing consultant with Monitor Group, researches how past experiences and future speculation influence the decision-making process for consumers.
Reaching Across Fields
Assistant Professor of Management Madeline King Kneeland’s education background is vast, including a bachelor’s degree in psychology and art history and a PhD in management. Her dissertation examines network dynamics at a law firm, and her research addresses concerns of social networks, technology, and innovation. Before Babson, she taught at Cornell University’s Johnson College of Business in the Nolan School of Hotel Administration.
Even more immersed in the law is Visiting Assistant Professor of Practice (Accounting & Law) Hannah Weiser, who is an attorney. She also has experience working at the United States Department of Education, consulting at Deloitte, teaching leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park, and as a founder of Weiser Consulting.
Before Assistant Professor of Strategy (Management) Emily Rosado-Solomon became an expert on interpersonal relationships in the workplace, she was a professional pastry chef in the United States and Israel. Her restaurant experience lends itself naturally to her work now, which looks at how employees can navigate mental health while at work.
Assistant Professor of Philosophy (Arts & Humanities) Alex Adamson researches decolonial critiques of political economy, scholar-activism, and queer and trans philosophy in their work. In their spare time, Adamson is a jazz aficionado and plays the upright bass player.
Expanding the Global Experience
Throughout his finance career, Assistant Professor of Finance Ahmed Ahmed has looked at things from both a domestic and international perspective. He evaluates the response of institutional investors, particularly insurance companies, to domestic and global monetary policy, and his experience has brought his work to New York, London, and Basel, Switzerland.
Assistant Professor of Strategy (Management) Yamlaksira Getachew is actively involved in the 39 Country Initiative, which aims to reduce poverty by helping improve business education in the world’s 39 least-developed countries. He has studied in Ethiopia and Canada, and his scholarship examines the interplay between businesses and sustainable development, including case studies on Ethiopian Airlines and tackling poverty in Kenya through social entrepreneurship.
His experience in the U.S. Coast Guard Academy brought Associate Professor of Practice (Operations and Information Management) Daniel Rice around the world from Australia to Connecticut. He eventually became a commissioned officer and draws on that experience as he works as an innovator in the tech and security spaces.
Visiting Assistant Professor (MAST) Nazanin Naderi worked as a consultant in Iran before she decided to get her PhD in industrial engineering. She has taught about facility planning and decision analysis, and recently not only received her project management certification but also uses her data and organizational skills to study policy regarding pandemics, health care, and renewable energy.
Elevating Their Babson Experience
Some of the new faces aren’t new at all. A few recently hired faculty members have been working at Babson in some capacity over the past decade.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Practice (Entrepreneurship) Stephen Brand has been a familiar face on campus for more than eight years as a mentor and co-director of the Summer Venture Program. He also taught in the Summer Study Program and has helped expand the College’s experiential learning efforts. As a leader in the entrepreneurship field, he has helped numerous businesses launch and scale.
Assistant Professor of Environmental Science (MAST) Sarah Foster has been teaching oceanography and socio-ecological systems courses since 2020 at Babson. She is driven by a goal to find sustainable solutions to the environmental crisis, specifically by studying how aquatic and human ecosystems can better interact with each other.
Already a favorite in his OTM courses, which he has been teaching as an adjunct lecturer since 2017, Associate Teaching Professor (MAST) Hongsheng Wu brings a knack for data science and business analytics and its various applications to the classroom. He has been the lead statistician on clinical trials, including a recent one about gout prevention.
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