Whitman School Welcomes New Faculty

The Martin J. Whitman School of Management has welcomed seven new faculty members for the 2015-16 academic year.

Avrenli

Kıvanç A. Avrenli, is assistant professor of statistics whose teaching interests focus on applied statistical methods, probability theory, statistical modeling and design of experiments. Prior to Whitman, he taught applied statistics and probability at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was included seven consecutive times with an “outstanding” rating in the “List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students.” In 2014, he received the Alumni Award in Teaching Excellence. At Whitman, he will teach courses in managerial statistics.

Avrenli earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in civil engineering from Boğaziçi University (formerly Robert College) in Istanbul, Turkey, the first American college established outside the borders of the U.S. He obtained a second M.S. degree in statistics and his Ph.D. in civil engineering with an emphasis on commercial aviation safety from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Broman

Markus Broman, is an assistant professor of finance whose research interests lie in the intersection of investments, international finance and the efficiency of financial markets. He is currently working on topics related to exchange-traded fund mispricing and liquidity, the impact of investor clienteles and trading on asset prices, and the effect of segmentation in the labor market for top executives on executive compensation.

His research has been awarded the Eastern Finance Association Outstanding Doctoral Student Paper and has been presented at leading academic conferences, including the American Finance Association and European Finance Association.

Broman earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Hanken School of Economics and his Ph.D. in business administration with a major in finance from Schulich School of Business at York University. He will be teaching undergraduate courses in investments at the Whitman School.

Williams

Trent Williams is an assistant professor of entrepreneurship whose research focuses on entrepreneurial venture emergence, resourcefulness, decision-making and resilience. His work has appeared in the Journal of Management, Organizational Research Methods, Journal of Management Studies and the Academy of Management Learning and Education, among others. He is particularly interested in idea generation at early stages of venture creation and will be teaching entrepreneurship classes at Whitman focusing on ideation and creativity.

Previously, Williams was a visiting assistant professor at Indiana University. He earned a B.A. in English and philosophy from Brigham Young University, an M.S. from Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management and a Ph.D. in entrepreneurship and strategic management from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Additionally, he has worked as a management consultant for Deloitte Consulting and PwC Advisory.

Mao

An associate professor of marketing at the University of Central Florida, Huifang Mao is visiting the Department of Marketing Management at the Whitman School during the 2015-2016 academic year. She will be teaching marketing research during her time at Whitman.

Mao earned her B.S. degree in business administration from Fudan University and her Ph.D. in marketing from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Her research examines how consumers process market information and make judgments and decisions accordingly. Specifically, her research interests include consumer evaluations of brand extensions, cross-cultural differences in consumer behavior and the information construal level theory. Her work has appeared in leading academic publications, such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology and Journal of Academy of Marketing Science.

Vincent

Lynne Vincent is an assistant professor of management whose research examines the moral and social implications of creativity. In contrast to the status quo view of creativity as inherently positive, she investigates the potential dark side and the unexpected consequences of creativity. Her research reveals that creativity and the perception of creativity influence decisions to engage in dishonest behaviors, how people handle negative experiences and even how people judge others. These processes affect how organizations encourage creativity, how organizations design jobs and how hiring decisions are made. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and Psychological Science.

Vincent earned her B.S. in industrial and labor relations and her M.S. and Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Cornell University. She will be teaching undergraduate strategic human resource management classes at Whitman.

Witt

Gary Witt is an assistant professor of finance practice. After receiving his Ph.D. in statistics from the Wharton School of Business in 1987, Witt pursued a 20-year career in finance in New York and London in derivatives, structured finance and investment management. In the 1990s, he managed the derivatives trading desk at Sakura Global Capital in London after working for General Re and Citibank as an over-the-counter interest rate option trader. In 2005, as a managing director at Moody’s Investors Service, he left the collateralized debt obligation group to create the Moody’s operational risk rating team focused on hedge funds and to lead the mutual fund rating team that primarily rated money market and bond funds worldwide. From 2008 until 2015, Witt drew from his many years of experience to teach statistics and finance at Temple University.

Wo

David Wo is a visiting assistant professor of management who conducts research in four major areas: organizational fairness, workplace deviance, behavioral ethics and trickle effects. His work has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Human Relations, the Oxford Handbook of Workplace Justice and Research in Social Issues in Management.

Wo earned his B.S. from Fudan University and an M.B.A. and a master’s degree from the Devos Sports Business Management Program from the University of Central Florida. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Management at the University of Central Florida with a concentration in organizational behavior. He taught Strategic Management at UCF and has led two teams to place first and second in the Great Case Competition sponsored by Florida Blue. He will teach strategic human resource management at Whitman.