September 07, 2022

Meet Our New Faculty Members

We're excited to welcome these faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and postdoctoral researchers into the Tepper community.

New Faculty Members

Shubham Akshat joins the Tepper School as Visiting Assistant Professor of Operations Management. His vision is to develop and apply Operations Management methodologies for promoting equitable and efficient resource allocation among the grassroots population to bring about a positive impact. His dissertation focuses on fairness and efficiency issues in the deceased donor liver allocation policy in the United States. His research has won the best paper award (finalist) at INFORMS Public Sector Operations Research Section, 2020, and an honorable mention at College of Healthcare Operations Management, POMS, 2020. He completed his Ph.D. in Operations Management at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2022. He won several internal awards there, that includes Abraham Golub Dissertation Proposal Prize and Outstanding Graduate Assistantship Award.

Mattia Ciollaro joins the Tepper School as Adjunct Professor of Business Analytics. He received a Ph.D. in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2016. After completing his doctoral studies, he worked as a Data Scientist and a Machine Learning Engineer in both startups and larger organizations such as Amazon Alexa and PayPal/Venmo. He is also a co-founder of Data Captains – a boutique consulting firm – and a Consulting Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business (Duke University).

Emily DeJeu joins the Tepper School as a Teaching Track Assistant Professor in Business Communications. DeJeu received her MA and Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to joining the Tepper School faculty, DeJeu was a middle school Language Arts teacher and the Marketing Manager and Senior Staff Writer for an online company. DeJeu is an award-winning educator and researcher whose work has appeared in leading journals, several edited collections, and a forthcoming textbook series from Bedford/St. Martin’s publishing.

Amr Farahat is Associate Teaching Professor of Business Analytics at the Tepper School. He teaches courses in the MBA and Master of Business Analytics programs. His research interests are in data-driven mathematical models supporting operations and revenue management. Prior to joining the Tepper School, Farahat was Senior Lecturer in Operations Research and Statistics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and prior to that, he served on the faculty at Cornell University and at Washington University in St. Louis. Farahat holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT.

Eric Fencil, Adjunct Professor of Finance, possesses a rare combination of finance and technical know-how built over a 16-year career working in finance and banking. In his role as Executive Vice President, Product Development at Troutwood, a Pittsburgh-based fintech company that enables individuals to make informed financial decisions through scalable technology, he designs applications to keep the development queue filled. Fencil earned the right to use both the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) designations. He holds a bachelor's degree in Finance from Duquesne University and an MBA with a concentration in Finance from the Tepper School, where he will be teaching Financial Statement Analysis to second-year MBA students. Fencil is a board member and the Vice President of CFA Society Pittsburgh and actively plans and executes events promoting financial literacy throughout the Pittsburgh region. Former professional pursuits included work in the Market Risk and Collateral Valuation functions of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh and serving as an equity portfolio manager covering the health care sector as asset manager at C.S. McKee. His self-admitted “habit of running too many marathons each year” does afford him the opportunity to travel and explore cities across the country. He, his wife Diane, and three children – Sophie, Lucy, and Ryan – call Cranberry Township, PA their home.

David Charles Goyette is Associate Teaching Professor of Acting and Business Communication at the Tepper School. He most recently held the theatre department chair position at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO where he was a Tenured Associate Professor of Theatre. He has worked with The Shakespeare Theatre Company, American Theatre Company, The Araca Group, Arena Stage, Perseverance Theatre, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, The Source Theatre Company, African Continuum Theatre Company, Fredericksburg Theatre Company, Tsunami Theatre Company, Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage, and Walt Disney Pictures. He also worked with The Jack Morton Company in Washington, D.C., an experiential and event communications firm where his clients included Mastercard International, British Airways, United States Postal Service, and MedImmune Inc./AstraZeneca among others. He graduated with an MFA in Directing from the University of Texas at Austin and a BFA in Drama from Carnegie Mellon University.

Derek Leben is Associate Teaching Professor of Ethics at the Tepper School. His research focuses on principles of fairness and weighing harms from the perspective of a contractarian ethical theory, and how organizations can implement these principles into standards for AI and autonomous systems. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2012 and taught ethics at the University of Pittsburgh for ten years before joining the Tepper School. In his book, "Ethics for Robots: how to design a moral algorithm" (Routledge, 2018), Leben defends a Rawlsian "maximin" principle for autonomous systems which impact human well-being in the fields of transportation, healthcare, and defense. As founder of the consulting group Ethical Algorithms, Leben has worked with governments and companies to develop policies on fairness and benefit for AI and autonomous systems.

Juan Rivera Lebron, Distinguished Service Professor of Acting and Business Communication, is a native of Puerto Rico and has worked as a professional actor on film, television, and theaters throughout the United States for the last 25 years. He received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and holds an MFA in Theater Pedagogy and an MS in Adult Organizational Learning and Leadership from the University of Idaho. He was the recipient of the Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellowship funded by the William & Eva Fox Foundation and administered by TCG. His fellowship research focused on the textual and performance similarities between Shakespeare and Spanish Classical plays, and as a result, he was selected to be part of the U.S. delegation to the UNESCO International Theater Institute World Congress in Madrid, Spain. He has taught performance techniques throughout his professional career for various organizations, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Guthrie Theater, Geffen Playhouse, University of Nebraska, and recently as a professor at Azusa Pacific University. He is a facilitator for eCornell’s Executive Presence program and Special Visiting Faculty in Acting at CMU's School of Drama.

Lihong Liang is Visiting Associate Professor of Accounting at the Tepper School and Associate Professor of Accounting at Syracuse University. Liang received her Ph.D. and MS from Pennsylvania State University and BS from Beijing University of Technology. Her areas of expertise include financial accounting, analyst forecasts, corporate governance, financial reporting, and market anomalies. Her work has been published in Review of Accounting Studies, The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, and other leading industry journals. She previously taught at George Washington University and Georgetown University.

Carrington Motley joins the Tepper School faculty as an Instructor in Organization Theory and Entrepreneurship. Before graduate school, Motley worked for four venture-backed start-ups, including a Parisian startup where business was conducted in French, where he developed a passion for understanding what enabled specific new ventures to achieve outsized success. Motley’s current research thus lies at the intersection of entrepreneurship, strategy, and organizational theory. Insights from his work will enable entrepreneurs to manage changes more effectively and learn from their past experiences to create high-performing new ventures. Motley received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT with a business minor from the Sloan School, an MS in Management Science & Engineering (MS&E) from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in MS&E from Stanford (fall 2022).

Karan Singh joins the Tepper School as Assistant Professor of Operations Research. In November 2021, he completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Princeton University (dissertation), advised by Elad Hazan. While at Princeton, Singh was awarded the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, Princeton University's highest graduate student honor. Before that, he completed his bachelor's at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, where he received the President's Gold Medal for the best academic performance in the graduating class. Singh's research addresses statistical and computational challenges in feedback-driven interactive learning, spanning both prediction and control. His results draw from the algorithmic toolkits of optimization and online learning, together with techniques from dynamical systems and control theory.

Inki Sul is Visiting Assistant Professor of Operations Management. His research is centered around understanding customers’ behavioral regularities in revenue and pricing management of retail operation and e-commerce. His research solves practically motivated problems originating from collaborations with fashion retailers or from internship at e-commerce retailers. He obtained his Ph.D. in Operations Management from Jindal School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., he received his MS in Operations Management from Northwestern University. He also earned an MS in Management Science and Engineering, BS in Operations Research: Engineering Management Systems from Columbia University. Research interests include revenue management and pricing, retail operations, behavioral operations management, operations-marketing interface, structural estimation, and causal inference.

New Postdoctoral Fellows and Researchers

Christopher Dishop received his Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from Michigan State University in December of 2020. He then spent a year at the U.S. Army Research Institute conducting research with the Foundational Science Research Unit located in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. He is now a postdoctoral fellow in Organizational Behavior and Theory at the Tepper School. His work has appeared in the Journal of Business Research, Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Organizational Psychology Review, and Psychological Methods. In his free time, he enjoys playing tag with his nephews, euchre with his friends, and piano with his dad.

Yatharth Dubey is a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Gérard Cornuéjols. Starting July 2023, he will be a tenure-track assistant professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Broadly, his research is concerned with strengthening our understanding of the algorithms that allow us to make large-scale discrete decisions — in particular, the algorithms underlying state-of-the-art mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) solvers. Dubey studies both theoretical and practical aspects of branch-and-bound and cutting planes to better solve MILP problems occurring in operations research. He received his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, working with Santanu Dey and Marco Molinaro, in 2022.

Chuqing Jin is a postdoctoral fellow at the Tepper School. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Economics at Boston University. Her research falls at the intersection of industrial organization and applied econometrics, with a focus on applications in the finance and technology industries. In particular, she creates novel models to help understand how information frictions are generated in these industries, as well as how they affect competition and welfare. Combining these models with data, she produces empirical findings to guide policy. Jin’s job market paper uses financial analysts’ forecast data to disentangle their incentives for information provision and derive policy implications for improving information quality in the financial market. When she is not doing economics, she enjoys doing yoga, rock climbing, reading, and going to concerts.