Featured Researchers

Rellie Derfler-Rozin, assistant professor of management and organization, received her PhD in organizational behavior from London Business School. She focuses her research on how behaviors and decisions at the workplace are affected by psychological anxieties that relate to threats to fundamental needs, such as the need to maintain status in a group and the need to belong to a group. Her recent work examines employees’ responses to discretionary-versus-rule-based allocation systems, behaviors of employees that are at risk of being socially excluded at the workplace, and the relationship between task variety and ethical behavior.

Kislaya Prasad is a research professor of decision, operations and information technology whose principal research focus is on the computability and complexity of individual decisions and economic equilibrium, innovation and diffusion of technology, and social influences on economic behavior. He is also the director of the Smith School’s Center for International Business Education and Research. Recent projects include medical treatment variations and diffusion of technologies in medicine, complexity of choice under uncertainty, and experimental tests of contract theory. His research is currently funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Prasad is also a guest scholar at the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics, The Brookings Institution, Washington D.C.

Roland T. Rust is Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing and founder and executive director of two research centers: the Center for Excellence in Service and the Center for Complexity in Business. He is also visiting chair in marketing science at Erasmus University (Netherlands), International Research Fellow of Oxford University’s Center for Corporate Reputation (UK) and International Fellow at the CTF Service Research Center at Karlstad University (Sweden). He was chair of the department of marketing at Maryland for eight years, during which he presided over a dramatic improvement in the marketing faculty—in his last year as chair the department ranked number one in the world in number of publications in the top four marketing journals.

Liu Yang, assistant professor of finance, focuses her research on theoretical and empirical corporate finance in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, corporate restructuring, corporate governance, labor economics and financial institutions. Her recent work on merger waves examines how and why public and private firms act differently during merger waves. She also uses corporate restructuring events to compare the quality of human capital in focused and conglomerate firms and to investigate how female leadership affects the gender wage gap for workers.