Maryland Smith Announces Five New Faculty Members

There will be a few new professors in the corridors of Van Munching Hall and in Maryland Smith’s online courses this academic year.

Five new professors will join the faculty at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Here’s a little bit about them.

Gah-Yi Ban will join the faculty in fall of 2020 as associate professor in the department of decision, operations and information technologies (DOIT). Prior to joining Maryland Smith, she was on the faculty at London Business School, having completed her PhD at UC Berkeley. Her main research is in data-driven operations; specifically, decision-making with complex, high-dimensional and highly uncertain data with business applications. Gah-Yi has received various accolades for her research. She earned honorable mention in the 2018 INFORMS JFIG Paper Competition; was a finalist for the 2019 INFORMS Data Mining Section Best Paper Award, and co-authored the most downloaded Operations Research article published in 2019, titled “The Big Data Newsvendor: Practical Insights from Machine Learning.” In teaching, she earned the 2018 Best Teacher Award in Masters in Management, and was named one of Poets & Quants World’s Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors in 2020. She serves as an associate editor of Management Science and Service Science, and Chair of the Supply Chain Special Interest Group of M&SOM society. She has also given a TEDx talk, on "The Power and Perils of Algorithms."

Xiaojia Guo will join DOIT as an assistant professor in January of 2021. She recently completed her PhD in Management Science and Operations at UCL School of Management, University College London. Xiaojia is the recipient of the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society Best Student Paper Award, and the INFORMS Aviation Application Section Best Student Presentation Award in 2018. She was also a finalist of the M&SOM Practice-based Research Competition, the POMS-JD.com Best DataDriven Research Paper Competition, and the Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice in 2019. Xiaojia’s research interests include Business Analytics, Probabilistic Forecasts, Machine Learning, and Combining Forecasts.

Bruno Pellegrino will be an assistant professor of finance beginning in January of 2021. Pellegrino earned his PhD in global economics and management from UCLA. He earned a master's in finance and economics from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Italy’s Bocconi University. His areas of expertise include finance, macroeconomics and industrial organization. He has worked as a research professional at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and as a global macro research analyst at Credit Suisse in London.

Thomas Ernst will join the finance department as an assistant professor in fall of 2020. Ernst earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, where he earned the MIT Sloan Doctoral Program Fellowship. In 2018, he received Sloan’s Finance Group Above & Beyond PhD Student Award. Stern previously received a master’s degree from MIT, studying management research. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in mathematics and economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His areas of expertise are market microstructure and asset pricing.

Idil Yaveroglu will join the marketing department as a lecturer in fall of 2020. She completed her PhD at Georgia State University, where her dissertation was, “The Relative Effects of Price, Brand Name, and Store Name on Buyers’ Product Evaluations in Online and Offline Markets and the Moderating Role of Web Expertise.” Her research interests include pricing, online advertising, and online consumer behavior. She has published in the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Business Research, and the Journal of International Consumer Marking, among others. She was consistently ranked highly on teaching evaluations among business school faculty at Koc University in Istanbul, where she taught for eight years. Yaveroglu was most recently teaching at George Washington University.