On the Move

IDRIS ADJERID

Associate professor
Business Information Technology

EDUCATION
• Ph.D., Information Systems and Management, Carnegie Mellon University, 2013
• MBA, Virginia Tech, 2008
• B.S., Business Information Technology, Virginia Tech, 2005

Adjerid’s research interests are privacy and security, health information technology and health information exchanges, and healthcare analytics.

His research uses econometric methods as well as lab and field experiments and consists of two, often overlapping, streams. The first stream focuses on the economics of privacy, with a focus on the intersection of behavioral economics and privacy decision making. The second stream focuses on the economics of healthcare technologies.

His research has been published in leading journals, including Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, American Psychologist, and ACM Computing Surveys.

Adjerid was previously an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame, where he received awards and grants for his teaching and research. He started his professional career at the Government Accountability Office, working as a senior technology analyst.

His work and expert commentary have been cited by numerous outlets in the popular press, including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Wired, Politico, and USA Today.

KIRAN AWATE

Assistant professor
Management

EDUCATION
• Ph.D., Management, The Ohio State University, 2018
• MBA, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India, 2011
• B. Engineering, University of Pune, India, 1997

Awate’s dissertation examines how firms learn from failures during the drug discovery process in the pharmaceutical industry. His work highlights how failures help firms reconsider their existing beliefs and seek out better and more refined theoretical explanations.

Awate won the best research presentation award twice at the Hayes Research Forum. His work was nominated for the best paper award at the annual conference of the Academy of International Business.

He has taught undergraduate courses in international business at the Ohio State University. Before embarking on his Ph.D. studies, Awate worked in the software technology industry for about nine years in India, the Middle East, Britain, and the U.S.

ROGER EDELEN

Associate professor
Finance, Insurance and Business Law

EDUCATION
• Ph.D., Finance, University of Rochester, 1996
• MBA, University of Texas at Austin, 1989
• B.S. Mathematics, University of Texas at Austin, 1984

Edelen’s research interest is institutional investing, where he has made both empirical and theoretical contributions. Much of his work has focused on the role that operational and organizational influences play on mutual fund performance, particularly relating to transaction costs and shareholder flow.

More generally, his interests in institutional trading have generated several studies of asset pricing relating to aggregate fund flows, high-frequency price adjustment delays, indexed securities, IPO pricing strategies, post-issuance returns of secondary equity offerings, and factor-based stock market anomalies.

Edelen has taught courses on statistics, investments, equity valuation, and derivative securities.

Before joining Virginia Tech, Edelen was an associate professor at the University of California at Davis Graduate School of Management. He also taught at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

His four years of experience in the investment management industry comprises work at ReFlow Management as director of research and at Mellon Capital Management as director of enhanced equity strategies; options trading at O’Connor and Associates; and consulting services on litigation and financial product development.

PANKAJ KUMAR

Assistant professor
Management

EDUCATION
• Ph.D., Business Administration, University of Minnesota, 2018
• MBA, INCAE Business School, Cost Rica, 2007
• B. Engineering, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, India, 2003

Kumar’s research interests lie at the intersection of strategy and organization theory, with a focus on innovation, interfirm relationships, strategic alliances, and geography. His dissertation examined the determinants of innovation by firms as a function of their alliance social-structure stability and the geographical location of their subsidiaries that engaged in these alliances.

His other research explores the link between the geographic distance among firms’ alliance partners and the stability of their relational structures and the link between firms’ internationalization and their innovation in host countries.

Kumar co-authored an article that was recently accepted for the Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings.

He has taught courses on fundamentals of management and creative leadership.

Kumar’s industry experience includes being the chief financial officer at Universidad Veritas in Costa Rica and member of the board of directors of CPI Panama. He also worked as a consultant for the Bain and Co. affiliate, Mesoamerica, in Costa Rica and as an assistant manager for Larsen and Toubro in India.

MICHELLE LOWRY

Assistant professor
Accounting and Information Systems

EDUCATION
• Ph.D., Accounting, University of Hong Kong, 2018
• Master of Accounting, Brigham Young University, 2004
• B.S., Business Management, Brigham Young University, 1998

Lowry’s research interests are in corporate governance, governance structures, monitoring, minority shareholder expropriation, and financial disclosure. Her dissertation investigated the use of status as a mechanism to control corporate boards around two Hong Kong regulations that increase board independence.

Her co-authored papers have examined minority shareholder expropriation and financial disclosure in Hong Kong/China settings. One of her projects explores synergies between corporate governance and information technology governance in a U.S. setting.

Her honors and grants include a Hong Kong University Grants Council GRF Grant (co-investigator), Best Paper Award at the 2017 Symposium of Accounting, Auditing, and Corporate Governance Practices in China, and a Hong Kong Postgraduate Fellowship Award.

A certified public accountant, Lowry has seven years of public accounting firm experience in Arizona and Utah, most recently as a manager in taxation.

PAUL BENJAMIN LOWRY

Suzanne Parker Thornhill Professor
Business Information Technology

EDUCATION
• Ph.D., Management Information Systems, University of Arizona, 2002
• MBA, Brigham Young University
• B.S., Information Management, Brigham Young University, 1991

An internationally recognized scholar, Lowry has been identified as the top information systems scholar in the world, based on publications in the top six information systems journals. He has published 107 journal articles, including those in the field’s leading journals.

Lowry has published 82 papers with 78 different undergraduate and graduate students. He helped place 35 master’s degree students in top Ph.D. programs in the U.S. and Canada and served on over 20 doctoral dissertation committees.

His research explores four areas, from international and cross-cultural perspectives: organizational and behavioral security and privacy; human-computer interaction, social media, gamification, and online deviance; e-commerce, decision science; and supply chains; and scientometrics.

Lowry has taught courses in data analytics and data mining, information systems, management consulting, human-computer interaction, and cyber-ethics.

He served as a professor in Hong Kong since 2011, most recently as full professor at the University of Hong Kong. He is co-editor-in-chief of AIS-Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction. He also serves in an editorial capacity for Decision Sciences, the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, the European Journal of Information Systems, and Heliyon.

VITALI MINDEL

Assistant Professor
Business Information Technology

EDUCATION
• Ph.D., Computer Information Systems, Georgia State University, 2018
• B.S., Economics, Georgia State University, 2012

Mindel’s research examines the sustainability and governance of decentralized online information systems and the role of technology in improving both clinical and administrative healthcare operations.

His healthcare related research has been published in Journal of the Association for Information Systems and Journal of Management Information Systems. His work on decentralized information systems, which led to the development of a novel theory related to information commons and emerging technologies, was published in MIS Quarterly.

MAXIMILIAN STALLKAMP

Assistant Professor
Management

EDUCATION
• Ph.D., International Business, Ivey Business School, Canada, 2018
• M.A., Strategy and International Management, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2014
• B.A. Economics, University of British Columbia, Canada, 2012

Stallkamp’s research focuses on how firms initiate, expand, and organize their international activities, particularly foreign direct investment in developed and emerging markets. Several of his current research projects focus on firms with digital and platform-based business models.

His research has been published in the Journal of International Business Studies and the Journal of Management Studies.

A proponent of case teaching and case writing, Stallkamp has co-authored a teaching case on a Canadian craft brewery. He taught courses in competitive strategy and global strategy at the Ivey Business School.

A German citizen, Stallkamp has lived in six countries.

FLORIAN ZACH

Assistant Professor
Hospitality and Tourism Management

EDUCATION
• Ph.D., Business Administration, Temple University, 2009
• M.S. Leopold Franzens University, Austria, 2003
• B.S. Leopold Franzens University, Austria, 2003

Zach’s research interest is in innovation, specifically in the development of tourism destinations.

His dissertation investigated the development of new services by an American destination marketing organization. His recent work has focused on the impacts of networks, knowledge, and relationships on innovation in tourism destinations, as well as business models in tourism and hospitality.

His work has been published in such top journals as Tourism Management, Annals of Tourism Research, and the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research.

A co-founder of the Alliance of Innovation and Research in Tourism and Hospitality, Zach most recently served in the Carson College of Business at Washington State University as the Tod and Maxine McClaskey Faculty Fellow.

He has extensive applied knowledge of the hospitality industry through his work as assistant manager of the Hotel Zach, owned and operated by his family in Innsbruck.

New Administrative and Professional Faculty

CHRIS BARTLETT

Associate Director of Development

CHRIS BARTLETT was appointed associate director of development and will focus on major-gift fundraising efforts to support Pamplin’s strategic priorities. He joined Virginia Tech in 2013 and most recently served as the assistant director of development for Moss Arts Center. He was previously a financial planning analyst with the Office of Budget and Financial Planning where he assisted in creating the university’s six-year plan submissions as well as long-term strategic and financial plans.

Bartlett received his bachelor’s in religious studies from the South Carolina Honors College at the University of South Carolina in 2002. He worked in sales and marketing with T-Mobile before returning to USC for an international MBA, which he completed in 2009. As a Presidential Management Fellow, he served the Department of Homeland Security’s CFO as a classified programs analyst.