Media Releases

Rotman PhDs and faculty members honoured for their research

July 7, 2014

TORONTO, ON – Five past and cur­rent PhD stu­dents in the areas of finance, account­ing, and oper­a­tions man­age­ment from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toronto’s Rot­man School of Man­age­ment along with a new fac­ul­ty mem­ber in strate­gic man­age­ment have been award­ed hon­ours and schol­ar­ships for their research papers and pro­pos­als.

Shengzhe Tang, a PhD stu­dent in finance at the Rot­man School, has won a Cana­di­an Deriv­a­tives Exchanges schol­ar­ship of $20,000 from the Mon­tre­al Exchange for the 2014/15 aca­d­e­m­ic year. Tang applied to the pro­gram with a research project to study liq­uid­i­ty and mar­ket mak­ing cost dynam­ics in the equi­ty option mar­ket. The schol­ar­ship was announced in June.

Leila Peyra­van, a PhD stu­dent in account­ing at the Rot­man School, has been award­ed a Robert Bertram Doc­tor­al Research Award of $15,000 from the Cana­di­an Foun­da­tion for Gov­er­nance Research. Her research project will exam­ine the effect of dual-own­er­ship of activist investors on the tar­get firm’s account­ing qual­i­ty.

Lau­ra Doer­ing who joined the Rot­man School this month as an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of strate­gic man­age­ment, won the 2014 Burt Grad­u­ate Stu­dent Paper Award from the Amer­i­can Soci­o­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion’s Eco­nom­ic Soci­ol­o­gy Sec­tion. Her paper, “Rethink­ing Esca­la­tion of Com­mit­ment: Rela­tion­al Lend­ing in Micro­fi­nance,” was com­plet­ed as part of Prof. Doering’s PhD at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go.

Two Rot­man PhDs stu­dents won awards in the stu­dent com­pe­ti­tion at the 2014 con­fer­ence of the Cana­di­an Oper­a­tional Research Soci­ety. Jian­fu (Jeff) Wang, who grad­u­at­ed from the PhD pro­gram in Decem­ber, won the Queue­ing Spe­cial Inter­est Group stu­dent com­pe­ti­tion award for his paper “Using strate­gic idle­ness to improve cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ence in ser­vice net­work,” which was pub­lished in Oper­a­tions Research in 2013. The paper was co-authored with Rot­man Pro­fes­sors Opher Baron, Oded Berman, and Dmit­ry Krass. Cur­rent PHD stu­dent Vahid Sarhangian was select­ed as the run­ner up for the Stu­dent Paper Com­pe­ti­tion (Open Cat­e­go­ry) for his paper, ”Allo­ca­tion poli­cies in blood trans­fu­sion.” This paper was co-authored with Rot­man Profs. Baron and Berman and Prof. Hos­sein Abouee-Mehrizi of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Water­loo.

Youli Zou, a grad­u­ate of the Rot­man PhD pro­gram, will receive the 2014 Best Dis­ser­ta­tion Award in Finan­cial Account­ing (FARS) from the Amer­i­can Account­ing Asso­ci­a­tion at the organization’s annu­al meet­ing in August. Her dis­ser­ta­tion was on “Strate­gic Entry Deci­sions, Account­ing Sig­nals, and Risk Man­age­ment Dis­clo­sure.”  She is cur­rent­ly an assis­tant pro­fes­sor in accoun­tan­cy at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.

The Rot­man School of Man­age­ment at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to is redesign­ing busi­ness edu­ca­tion for the 21st cen­tu­ry with a cur­ricu­lum based on Inte­gra­tive Think­ing. Locat­ed in the world’s most diverse city, the Rot­man School fos­ters a new way to think that enables the design of cre­ative busi­ness solu­tions.  For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it www.rotman.utoronto.ca.

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For more infor­ma­tion:

Ken McGuf­fin
Man­ag­er, Media Rela­tions
Rot­man School of Man­age­ment
Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to
Voice 416.946.3818
E‑mail mcguffin@rotman.utoronto.ca
Fol­low Rot­man on Twit­ter @rotmanschool
Watch Rot­man on You Tube www.youtube.com/rotmanschool