Smith Hires New Marketing, Finance, Information Technology Faculty

The Smith School is adding to its already impressive faculty with five new hires who will join the school to start the fall 2024 semester. Joining Smith are three new marketing professors, a finance professor, and a professor in the decision, operations and information technologies department. The school is actively seeking additional professors in finance, information technology and accounting.

In marketing, Daniel McCarthy will join Smith as an associate professor 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 is also actively researching 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 been featured in major media outlets. He earned his PhD in statistics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Xinying Hao will be an assistant professor of marketing, joining 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.

Cathy Chen was hired as a clinical associate professor of marketing, currently a visiting professor at Bucknell University. She earned her PhD from UCLA.

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.

In the decision, operations and information technologies department, John Silberholz ’10 will be the newest assistant professor, the same position he currently holds at the University of Michigan. His research is in the area of healthcare analytics, and he is particularly interested in clinical trials. He earned his PhD from MIT and his 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.