Introducing New Smith School Faculty Members for the Fall 2024 Semester

The fall 2024 semester is officially underway at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Among the marks of a new semester are the new (and some familiar) faces taking their place in the Smith community.

Collectively, these professors will work toward upholding and advancing the Smith School’s strategic imperatives inside and out of the classroom, including its guiding principle that “business is everyone’s business.”

They’ll also impart decades of professional and academic research experience in financial policy regulation, business law, marketing analytics and artificial intelligence to the next generation of business leaders.

Meet Smith’s newest faculty members:

Manmohan Aseri joins the Smith School as an assistant professor in the Decision, Operations and Information Technologies (DOIT) department, previously holding the same title at the University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business. Aseri’s research primarily focuses on AI economics, emphasizing algorithmic bias, fair advertising, AI adoption and pricing, among other topics. His work has received recognition from the Conference on Information Systems and Technology, several of which have been published in Management Science and Information Systems Research. He earned the 2023 Management Science Distinguished Service Award for Reviewer and was a finalist for the 2023 Management Science Best Paper Award in Information Systems.

Minoo Modaresnezhad, associate clinical professor, received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2017. She was previously an associate professor of management information systems at the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Cameron School of Business and now serves as a faculty member for Smith’s DOIT department. Her research interests include exploring individual behavior and cognition within information systems, with recent areas of study including the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing-based systems, social networking systems, and individual security and privacy. Her work has been published in the Journal of Information Systems Applied Research, International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction and the Information Systems Education Journal.

Tania Babina will join the finance faculty from Columbia University, where she is an assistant professor. Babina is an expert in artificial intelligence and business analytics. She studies the drivers of innovation, entrepreneurship and technological change and their economic impact on firms, workers and society. She earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jordan Richmond, assistant professor of finance, holds a PhD from Princeton University. His research primarily explores corporate finance and public economics. Richmond’s paper, “Firm Responses to Book Income Alternative Minimum Taxes,” studying how firms respond to book income alternative minimum taxes, was recently published in the Journal of Public Economics. He describes his teaching philosophy through the following three principles: Providing concrete examples with real policy implications, being a resource for students and creating an environment that encourages students to take risks while learning from mistakes.

Daniel McCarthy will join Smith as an associate professor of marketing from Emory University. McCarthy’s research specialty is the application of leading-edge statistical methods to empirical marketing problems. His research interests included customer-based corporate valuation, which he popularized, customer lifetime value, limited data problems, data privacy, and the marketing/finance interface. He also actively researches the causal effect of actions and events on customer purchase behavior. His research has been published in top-tier academic journals, won numerous awards and featured in major media outlets. He earned his PhD in statistics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Xinying Hao, assistant professor of marketing, joins the Smith School from the University of Arizona. Her areas of expertise include big data research related to digital marketing, mobile targeting and online advertising. She earned her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin.

Elizabeth Stanwyck, senior lecturer, hails from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and now joins Smith’s DOIT department. Her previous research sits at the intersection of statistics and public health, with some of her published works covering topics such as wastewater treatment and growth in the Baltimore region, air pollution and children’s health. She also previously served as a UMBC Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Consulting research fellow.

Cathy Chen was hired as a clinical associate professor of marketing and is currently a visiting professor at Bucknell University. She earned her PhD from UCLA. Her research interests include digital and global marketing, marketing analytics and strategy, and consumer behavior.

John Silberholz ’10, assistant professor, joins the Smith DOIT faculty in the same position he held at the University of Michigan. His research is in healthcare analytics, and he is particularly interested in clinical trials. He earned his PhD from MIT and bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland in 2010, with a double major in computer science and mathematics. As an undergraduate, Silberholz collaborated with Smith professor and mentor Bruce Golden on research to improve hospital patient care. After graduating from UMD, he won INFORMS' first undergraduate operations research prize for his work.

Mark Flood, a senior research scholar in the Center for Financial Policy, is leveraging over two decades of experience in financial policy and regulation at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Office of Thrift Supervision, Federal Housing Finance Board, Federal Housing Finance Agency, and the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

George Gao is a visiting clinical professor of finance at the Smith School. He recently held the same teaching position with the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. His research has featured topics such as hedge funds, tail risks and analyzing monetary policy responses to the subprime and COVID-19 crises with “respect to their effectiveness in reducing disaster risk.”

Brian Jefferson, previously a Smith School adjunct professor, sees his appointment this semester as a lecturer and adjunct professor. Jefferson brings over two decades of experience from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), where he focused on the unique tax issues of multinational companies. His professional experience also includes exposure to tax policy, client service, ethics in business, accounting for income taxes, tax structuring, business ownership and culture. He is passionate about helping students develop problem-solving mindsets and preparing them for “a collaborative world that is human-led and technology-driven.”

Naman Desai earned his PhD in accounting from Florida State University. He brings over 15 years of teaching experience to the Smith School, having most recently served as a faculty member at the University of California, Riverside, and as academic director of its Master of Professional Accountancy program. Desai’s teaching history includes auditing, financial accounting and managerial accounting courses. His research interests are primarily in auditing and governance, and his papers have been published in Accounting Horizons, the Journal of Information Systems, the Journal of Business Research and the Journal of Accounting, among others.

Kevin McGarry is no stranger to the Smith community. He’s served as an adjunct professor and lecturer of business law at the school since 2021. This semester, he’s continuing to support Smith students in the classroom as a clinical professor and bringing his substantial academic and professional background in law and business, extending into medicine, trade-tax, strategy, management, securities, corporate disclosure, compliance and ethics.