October 03, 2023

Meet Our New Faculty Members

We are thrilled to welcome a distinguished group of new faculty members and postdoctoral researchers, each contributing their unique expertise and experiences to the Tepper School.

New Faculty Members

Ming Ming Chapman is a Distinguished Service Professor of Design at the Tepper School. She has led design teams working on transformational projects for brands like JPMorgan, Puma, The Body Shop, and cultural organizations and NGOs like the London Design Festival and UN Volunteer Service. She has presented at MIT, the Royal College of Art and KAIST, and taught design principles and processes to global brands like Comme des Garçons. Her research sits at the intersection of design, worldview, and social and ecological justice. Chapman holds a postgraduate certificate in teaching and learning and a Master of Arts in Design Futures from the University of London.

Mohsen Foroughifar joins the Tepper School as an Assistant Professor of Business Technologies. In June 2023, he completed his Ph.D. in Quantitative Marketing from the University of Toronto. His primary research focuses on understanding the challenges associated with deploying algorithmic pricing tools on platforms like Airbnb and the role of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies in advertising platforms. He is also exploring how AI is employed on digital platforms and how AI technology can improve efficiencies and benefit both sellers and consumers.

Evelyn Xiao-Yue Gong joins the Tepper School as an Assistant Professor of Operations Management. Gong’s main research develops artificial intelligence solutions for supply chain management and environmental sustainability. She is also interested in assortment optimization for reusable resources, pure exploration, algorithms and data-driven decision-making. Gong completed her Ph.D. in June 2023 at the Operations Research Center at MIT. Her dissertation received First Place in the Best Dissertation Competition at the 2023 Conference on Supply Chain Management in the Post-Pandemic and AI Age. During her Ph.D., she also gained valuable industry experience at Google Research, Microsoft Research AI, HelloFresh, and D.E. Shaw.

Minkyung Kim is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Tepper School, with a strong background in quantitative marketing and empirical industrial organization. Her recent research focuses on workforce management, specifically the design of job task allocation, pricing discretion, incentives for salespeople, and diversity issues. Additionally, Kim studies customer review contents on online platforms to measure customer satisfaction. She holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the Yale School of Management and joins the Tepper School from UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.

Simon Mayer joins the Tepper School as an Assistant Professor of Finance. His research interests span corporate finance, financial intermediation, financial technology, entrepreneurial finance, and private equity. Mayer hopes to explore new and emerging technologies tied to finance and data regulation and use theory and empirical data to determine how to improve those technologies for businesses and consumers. Prior to joining the Tepper School, he served as an Assistant Professor of Finance at HEC Paris. Mayer earned his Ph.D. in Financial Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam and Tinbergen Institute.

Aniko Öry is an Associate Professor of Economics with a focus on industrial organization, microeconomic theory, and quantitative marketing at the Tepper School. She is a game theorist researching dynamic pricing, online platforms and digital markets. Recently, Öry has a particular interest in algorithmic pricing, price competition, uncertain consumer preferences and network pricing in the airline industry. She joins the Tepper School from the Yale School of Management, where she was an Associate Professor of Marketing. Öry received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Carla Richards joins the Tepper School as an Adjunct Professor of Business Communication. As of September 2023, she is in the “all but dissertation” phase of her Ph.D. program in the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University. She also holds a Master of Arts degree from Chatham University in Environmental Communication. Richards’ academic pursuits encompass a range of interests in both teaching and research, including environmental, urban, health communication, sustainable business, interpersonal communication, and business ethics.

Diane Rulke joins the Tepper School as a Distinguished Service Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory. She is an international bestselling author whose books have been translated into 20-plus languages. Rulke has also been a keynote speaker at events, conferences, and festivals worldwide. Her research focuses on knowledge creation, group and organizational learning, creativity, and innovation within teams and organizations. She is also an expert on Chinese economy, international business, and trade relations, and appears regularly on television and radio. Rulke holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and Theory and a M.Sc. in Business Administration from Carnegie Mellon University.

André Sztutman joins the Tepper School as an Assistant Professor of Economics. His research interests lie at the intersection of public finance, macroeconomics, and finance, with a particular emphasis on issues related to imperfect information, inequality, and financial inclusion. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.

Gaoqing Zhang joins the Tepper School as a Visiting Associate Professor of Accounting. His research focuses on the real effects of accounting measurements and disclosure in the financial industry, as well as the design of accounting standards and disclosure regulations. More recently, he has been working on the economic and social consequences of sustainability reporting. He serves on the editorial board of The Accounting Review and has published his research in several esteemed journals, including the Journal of Accounting and Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research, Management Science, and The Accounting Review. His work has also been featured in notable business media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Risk Magazine, and Bloomberg. Zhang holds a Ph.D. in Accounting from the Tepper School of Business.

New Postdoctoral Researchers

Michal Lehmann, is a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. She completed her Ph.D. at the Hebrew University Business School, focusing on the intricacies of humility in work teams of two members. Lehmann’s research delves into the causes, outcomes, and boundary conditions of virtues in the workplace, with a special emphasis on how humility can enhance the understanding of people from diverse backgrounds. Prior to her academic pursuits, she worked for a decade as a global training manager in the high-tech industry in Israel.

Rudy Zhou is a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in the Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization in May 2023. Broadly, Zhou is interested in operations research and theoretical computer science. He is working on developing new technical tools to design algorithms for fundamental optimization problems with a focus on online and stochastic models. He is also working on applying these algorithms to applications in logistics and the cloud computing supply chain.