Meet the new class – of faculty!

The start of the academic year is always an exciting time for the UNC Kenan-Flagler community. In addition to new students, we welcome new faculty who continue our tradition of excellence in teaching, research and service.

Please join us in welcoming these new full-time faculty and post-doctoral research associates. Click on their names to read more about each of them.

Aymeric Bellon researches corporate finance, bankruptcy and financial intermediation, with topics primarily in environmental, energy and climate finance. His recent research studies how environmental lender liability affects banks’ incentives to influence the practices of their debtors and how private equity ownership changes firms’ incentives to pollute. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Norris Bruce, who joined the faculty in January 2022, studies incentives in marketing durables; advertising effectiveness in the sequential distribution of motion pictures; advertising’s dual effects of on sales and brand building; and the effects of pooling and forgetting on the performance of multi-themed advertising. He teaches marketing research and a PhD seminar on Bayesian statistical methods. He received his PhD from Duke University.

Christine Choi’s research interest lies at the intersection of inter-firm relationships, corporate scope, digital platforms and entrepreneurship. She focuses on a portfolio of inter-firm relationships that a company is engaged in and examines how the interdependencies across them influence the growth of its collaboration portfolio and corporate scope. She teaches strategy and entrepreneurship courses. She received her PhD in strategy from the University of Michigan.

Celine Fei researches empirical corporate finance with a focus on venture capital, fintech and private equity. She has studied the role of fintech lenders in reducing racial barriers in the Paycheck Protection Program during the COVID-19 crisis; portfolio composition in the private equity industry globally; and interaction between government and private investors in the venture capital sector in China. She teaches courses in corporate finance. She received her PhD in economics from the Toulouse School of Economics.

Abhinav Gupta’s research interests are in empirical corporate finance with a focus on entrepreneurial finance and private equity. He is especially interested in understanding how these topics interact with those in the broader economics discipline such as labor economics. He teaches courses in financial modeling. Before he began his academic career, he worked in management consulting at Boston Consulting Group. He earned his PhD in finance from New York University.

Ingrid Koch’s research areas are behavioral economics, experimental economics, field experiments, services marketing, credence goods, pricing and consumer signaling. Her teaching interests include services marketing, pricing and selling. Prior to joining UNC, she was a research fellow at the National University of Singapore. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Timothy Kundro’s research focuses on the complexities of morality and ethics at work. In particular, he investigates how employees respond to and manage (im)moral situations in the workplace. He teaches ethics and organizational behavior courses. He has partnered with public, private and federal organizations to conduct his research and served as an expert witness. He previously served on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame. He received his PhD in management from the University of Pennsylvania.

Min Young Lee researches behavioral ethics and impression mismanagement. She is interested in exploring various maladaptive perceptions and behaviors that can arise in an organization. Her teaching interests include interpersonal perceptions and ethics. She manages the Behavioral Lab, which advances thought leadership in behavioral research. She received her PhD in management from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Marie Mitchell studies behavioral ethics in the workplace, inclusion and exclusion dynamics at work, and destructive and conflictive work behavior and relationships. Her work has identified and explained the consequences of destructive work behaviors, such as abusive supervision, exclusion, workplace cheating and coworker undermining. She teaches ethical leadership. She earned her PhD from the University of Central Florida.

Chris Petsko conducts research on how stereotypes influence and often distort our perceptions of the people around us. His specialty is on the topic of intersectional stereotyping – how we stereotype others in light of the multiple social groups to which they belong. He teaches Leading and Managing to undergraduate students at UNC Kenan-Flagler. He received his PhD from Northwestern University.

Kimberley Williams has contributed to higher education for over 10 years through online and face-to-face teaching and course design. She teaches managerial and corporate communication and public speaking with the goal of inspiring and educating students in the art and power of effective communication. Her doctoral research examined student perceptions of instructor presence online. She is a former professional track and field athlete who was sponsored by and represented the PUMA Group brand internationally. She received her PhD in higher education administration from the University of Alabama.

Audra Wormald’s research focuses on understanding industry emergence and entrepreneurship as engines for social and economic change, particularly in developing economies. She is examining how to improve financial inclusion globally; how nonprofits can encourage enterprises and markets to reduce post-harvest loss, food waste and hunger; and the role of entrepreneurship training in enabling decision-making under high uncertainty in the agri-business sector. Her teaching interests include strategy and entrepreneurship. She earned her PhD in strategic management and entrepreneurship from the University of Maryland.

Jacob Zijian Zeng uses empirical methods and data science tools to study the implication of the Internet of Things (IoT) for retail operations. His work includes the analysis of promotional inventory displays using IoT data and IoT-based nudging for energy saving. His teaching interests are operations management, business analytics and retail operations. He received his PhD in operations management from the University of Texas at Austin.