New thought leaders at UNC Kenan-Flagler

UNC Kenan-Flagler welcomes seven talented professors who have joined the faculty, who are known for excellence in teaching and rigorous research that makes an impact on the practice of business.

The newest members of the UNC Kenan-Flagler community are:

• Finance Professor Yunzhi Hu studies financial intermediation, corporate finance and macro finance. His current work explains various economic recoveries patterns from the perspective of bank lending standards and entrepreneur entry. He has studied managers’ incentives in choosing asset “pledgeability” and the implications on financing cycles. He received his PhD in financial economics from the University of Chicago department of economics and Booth School of Business.

• Marketing Professor Kristopher Keller studies private label marketing, particularly the transition of private labels into true consumer-packaged goods brands. He also researches retailing, branding, marketing-mix effectiveness and innovation. He founded a jewelry retail store chain in Frankfurt, Germany. He received his PhD from Tilburg University, where he earned his research master’s degree in marketing and his master’s in marketing research.

• Strategy and Entrepreneurship Professor Jeffrey Kuhn researches technological innovation, intellectual property, corporate strategy and entrepreneurship. Much of his work focuses on the patent system’s causal impact on firm decisions and outcomes. He worked as a U.S. patent attorney. He is completing his PhD at the Haas School of Business and received his JD from the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

• Organizational Behavior Professor William Maddux works primarily in the area of cultural psychology. His main line of research examines how multicultural experiences affect a variety of psychological processes that are important for organizations, including creativity, innovation, leadership ability and morality. In other lines of work he looks at how cultural influences as well as other psychological factors affect people’s ability to negotiate and make decisions effectively. He came to the School after serving on the INSEAD faculty in France for 11 years.

• Strategy and Entrepreneurship Professor Timothy Ott studies strategic decision-making, entrepreneurial strategy and organizational learning. He focuses on the role of cognition in strategic decision making within organizations, especially in entrepreneurial firms and nascent markets. He is completing his PhD in the management science and engineering department at Stanford University.

• Marketing Professor Daniel Ringel is a quantitative modeler interested in creating managerial insights in large markets. He studies competitive analysis, visualization and clustering methods, big data problems, marketing engineering and digital markets. He worked for more than 10 years in management consulting, and founded a retail and wholesale business in the hobby industry. He received his PhD in marketing from Goethe-University Frankfurt.

• Organizational Behavior Professor Ovul Sezer studies self-presentation and how people attempt to manage impressions of others. She examines both the people and their motives underlying their self-presentation attempts and the consequences of such behavior. Her research on “humblebragging” has been featured in The Washington Post, Business Insider, Forbes, The Atlantic and The Boston Globe. She received her PhD from Harvard Business School.