Seventeen outstanding scholars have joined the ranks of full-time faculty this year, representing a wide range of disciplines and reflecting the university’s ongoing commitment to assembling a diverse and talented academic community. As introduced at the General Faculty Meeting in September, they are, by department and rank:

Accountancy

Sarah Shonka – Assistant Professor. Sarah earned her PhD in accounting from the University of Washington in 2015. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Georgia, and a master’s in accountancy from the University of Texas. Sarah has worked as a staff auditor at EY in Atlanta. Her teaching focus is in financial accounting and her research interests include financial reporting and its impact on capital markets.

Computer Information Systems

Elizabeth McCarron – Lecturer.  Though new to our full-time faculty, Liz has been a presence at Bentley for many years — first in administrative offices as a programmer analyst and technical consultant, and then as an adjunct instructor.  She is pursuing a doctorate in educational leadership at Endicott College and works in web development and related areas.

Xinru Page – Assistant Professor. Xinru comes to Bentley with several years of work experience in product management and interaction design in the information risk industry. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science at Stanford University and completed her doctoral work in information science at the University of California, Irvine.  Her research in human-computer interaction earned the 2015 iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Economics

Laura Jackson – Assistant Professor. Laura graduated summa cum laude from Bentley in 2010 with majors in managerial economics and liberal studies (global perspectives concentration). After graduation Laura earned a PhD in economics from the University of North Carolina in December 2014. She participated in the Council for the Status of Women in the Economics Professions summer fellowship program at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and held a dissertation internship at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Laura’s research focuses on monetary theory and examines how monetary policy has changed since the 2008 financial crisis. She received the 2014 Society for Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics, James B. Ramsey Prize for the top graduate student paper; her work is titled “Monetary Policy, Macro Factors, and the Term Structure at the Zero Lower Bound.”

English and Media Studies

Kevin Browne – Assistant Professor. Kevin joins us this fall as an assistant professor of rhetoric and writing. He received his PhD from Penn State in 2009 and, most recently, served as an assistant professor at Syracuse University. His 2013 book Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean explores the intersections of rhetoric, race and Caribbean culture. His current book project, entitled Deliberative Daemonic: Carnival and the Imaging of Emancipatory Practice, examines photography, public performance and social justice. He is co-founder of The Caribbean Memory Project, a long-term project in the vernacular, composition, and the digital humanities. He is also a photographer and a poet. 

Information and Process Management

David Murungi – Assistant Professor. David holds a master of public administration (MPA) and a PhD in business administration, both from Louisiana State University. Prior to joining Bentley he was an instructor and then an assistant professor of health administration at Our Lady of the Lake College, Baton Rouge, La.; he also worked for several Baton Rouge health organizations. His research focuses on understanding the impact of argumentation in information technology development projects. At Bentley he teaches business processes and systems courses in the undergraduate general business core.  

Sandeep Purao – Trustee Professor. Sandeep holds a PhD in management science from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His previous posts were at Georgia State University, as an assistant and then associate professor, and at Pennsylvania State University, as an associate professor and professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology. He also served as research director for the Center for Enterprise Architecture and coordinator for international programs at Penn State, and held visiting or advisory positions in Hong Kong, Singapore, Finland, Norway and Thailand, among other locations. Sandeep’s research deals with the design and evolution of complex technologies at larger scales such as organizations, governments and cities. He received the Pioneer award from the Design Science research community, as well as several grants from industry consortia and the National Science Foundation. At Bentley he teaches in both graduate and undergraduate programs.

Martin Wiener – Associate Professor. Martin holds a PhD in business and social sciences and a Habilitation degree in business administration from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Prior to joining Bentley he helped set up and manage a major interdisciplinary Research Center for Business and Society in Germany. He also worked at the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden to design and introduce a flagship MS program in international business. His primary research interest is in information technology offshoring. At Bentley he is teaching business process management and systems courses in the Emerging Leaders MBA program and in the undergraduate GB core.  

Law, Tax and Financial Planning

Kiana Pierre-Louis – Lecturer. Kiana has been with Bentley since 2008 as an adjunct professor.  She has taught the required core law courses for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as two popular undergraduate elective courses: Marketing Law, and Race and the Law. Kiana brings a wide variety of relevant, real-world legal experience to the Bentley classroom. She has been an attorney for more than a dozen years. Her practice has included civil litigation, corporate and real estate law, and criminal defense work.  Kiana is a graduate of Suffolk University Law School where she earned her JD cum laude. Kiana is also a Falcon Society graduate of Bentley University from which she holds a BS in business communication.

Management

Martin Conyon – Trustee Professor and Director of the Doctoral Program.  Martin comes to us from positions at Lancaster University Management School and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies organizations and corporate governance, investigating how factors such as boards of directors, executive compensation, organizational restructuring, and society and ethics combine to shape organizational outcomes and performance.  His influential body of research in this area includes approximately 100 articles, book chapters and reports, as well as a book on corporate governance. 

Anna Karpovsky – Visiting Assistant Professor. Anna is a newly minted PhD from the Bentley doctoral program, having worked with professors Bob Galliers, Sue Newell and Mike Quinn. Her dissertation was titled Information Systems Strategy and the Role of Chief Information Officers: Strategizing and Aligning Practices. In addition to continuing her research and getting Bentley seniors fine-tuned for the next stage of their career, Anna is focused on promoting women’s success in tech fields via a collaboration with University Career Services.   

James McCormack – Lecturer.  In addition to establishing a very successful career in the publishing industry, Jim has held adjunct teaching positions at several local colleges and universities, teaching a wide variety of courses.  He served in the Army National Guard for 34 years and is very active in the Boy Scouts, where two of his sons are Eagle scouts.

Marketing

Laurel Steinfield – Assistant Professor. Laurel is from Canada, received her MS and PhD degrees from Oxford University in England, and conducts research in South Africa and Uganda. Her dissertation is titled Rethinking Materialism: A Question of Judgments and Enactment of Power. In it, she examines materialism and repositions the concept as a judgment about consumption deemed inappropriate by those in power. She has found examples of this dynamic in America to maintain class-based stratification, in Uganda to maintain gender-based stratification, and in South Africa to maintain race-based stratification. 

Mathematical Sciences

Mita Das – Lecturer. Mita earned her PhD in mathematics from the University of Missouri in 2011 and, until recently, served as an associate professor at Middlesex Community College (MCC).  There, she created several new courses including one in differential equations, which is related to her specialty. She also was one of the first to introduce undergraduate student research in mathematics at MCC.  Her dissertation is in the area of dynamical systems and stability; more recently, she has become interested in longer-term measures of student success.

Qing (Wendy) Wang – Assistant Professor. Wendy earned her PhD in statistics from Penn State in 2012 and has been an assistant professor at Williams College since then.  When interviewing at Bentley she gave a research talk on u-statistics, which are part of estimation theory.  More broadly, her research interests include risk assessment, model selection and comparison, and extrapolation techniques.

Philosophy

Steven Campbell – Assistant Professor. Steve comes to us from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Fellow in the Perelman School’s Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy. Prior to that he served as a visiting assistant professor and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Coe College in Iowa, and as an instructor at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. He received his PhD in 2012 from the University of Michigan. Steve works in ethical theory, bioethics, and the growing field of the philosophy of disability. His work is published in journals such as the Journal of Applied Philosophy, the American Journal of Bioethics and Utilitas. He has taught courses in wide-ranging areas such as ethics, bioethics, environmental ethics, and the philosophy of gender and race.

Jessica Payson – Lecturer. Jessie comes to us from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania where she held the post of lecturer in its Philosophy Department from 2013 to 2015. Prior to that Jessie was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Binghamton University where she received a PhD in philosophy (2012) and a graduate certificate in feminist theory. Jessie has taught a wide range of courses including political philosophy, bioethics, critical thinking, feminism and development ethics. The last of these courses examines questions of international justice including ethical issues that attend the activities of multinational corporations in the developing world. She has presented papers at national conferences and published in scholarly journals such as Social Theory and Practice and Essays in Philosophy.