A Record Addition of New Faculty Members from September

TWENTYFIVE SCHOLARS FROM ACROSS THE WORLD ARE JOINING THE FACULTY, INCLUDING SIX IN SENIOR POSITIONS. GET TO KNOW THEM ALL

In September 2021, Bocconi once again resumes its activities with an extraordinary number of new additions to the faculty: 25 new members, including six in senior positions. “An ever-growing academic reputation allows us to be very attractive and to continue to invest in our future, even in a period that is objectively not easy,” says the Dean of the Faculty, Francesco Billari. “With faculty also coming from universities in China, Israel and Singapore, as well as a substantial number of from the United States, the cultural diversity of our faculty is growing further.” 
 
An ever-expanding disciplinary area, due to its cross-cutting nature in research in every field, is computer science. Alongside specialists in theoretical computer science, in fact, a number of researchers who use it as a tool in their studies are also coming to Bocconi. 
 

The Department of Decision Sciences is boosted with six faculty, including one Full and one Associate Professor.


 
The Full Professor is Alon Rosen. He comes from the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science, Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), in Israel, where he started as a Lecturer and ran the whole career gamut up to Professor. He obtained his PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science and, before joining the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science, has been a Postdoctoral Fellow both at Harvard and MIT. His main fields of interest are Cryptography and Computational Complexity.
 
Another senior faculty joining the Department as an Associate Professor is Botond Szabó. Coming from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Szabó did his PhD at the Eindhoven University of Technology and worked both at Amsterdam and Leiden Universities. Bayesian statistics and machine learning are among his research interests.
 
Artificial intelligence, game theory and optimization are the topics dear to Andrea Celli, who is joining the Department as an Assistant Professor. After a PhD and a stint as Postdoctoral Fellow at Politecnico di Milano, Celli joined London’s Facebook Core Data Science, a research and development team, working to improve Facebook's products, infrastructure, and processes.
 
Antonio De Rosa, another new Assistant Professor, comes from the University of Maryland’s Department of Mathematics and his main research interests are the geometric analysis, partial differential equations, and geometric measure theory. He obtained his PhD at the University of Zurich and, before joining the University of Maryland, worked at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.
 
A scholar of Computer Science, Marek Eliáš joins the Department as an Assistant Professor after a PhD at the Eindhoven University of Technology and experiences as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and at Amsterdam’s Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. Theory of algorithms and Discrete optimization are his main topics.
 
A physicist by education, Enrico Malatesta earned a PhD from the University of Milan. He studies optimization problems, neural networks, and machine learning. He’s already been a Postdoctoral researcher at ArtLab, the Bocconi Artificial Intelligence Lab.
 
 
The Department of Accounting also grows by six, including one Distinguished and one Full Professor.
 


Stephen Penman joins the Department of Accounting as Distinguished Professor. A University of Chicago PhD, he’s been working at the Columbia Business School since 1999 and at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley before then. His research deals with the valuation of equity and the role of accounting information in security analysis, and a number of his papers deal with accounting policy issues. Professor Penman is a founding editor of the Review of Accounting Studies and served as managing editor from 2002-2006. In 2019, he was elected to the Accounting Hall of Fame.
 
Wanli Zhao joins Bocconi as a Full Professor from the Hanqing Advanced Institute of Economics and Finance of the Renmin University of China in Beijing. He got his PhD from the Fox School of Business at Temple University in Philadelphia and worked at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and at the College of Business at the Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. His research focuses on governance-related topics and has been cross-disciplinary in finance, accounting, and economics.
 
Carlo D’Augusta obtained his PhD from Bocconi in 2012, before covering positions as Assistant Professor at Georgia State University and Middle Tennessee State University. His research is in financial reporting. More specifically, he is interested in understanding how characteristics of financial information affect the capital markets and investors’ reaction to financial disclosure, as well as how different types of disclosures can interact to affect information users. He joins Bocconi as Assistant Professor.
 
Moritz Hiemann’s research examines the role of accounting in both managerial and financial reporting applications, including financial contracting and business valuation. He holds a PhD in business administration from Stanford University. In 2013, he joined the Columbia Business School, where he taught financial accounting in the MBA program. He joins Bocconi as Assistant Professor.
 
Tim Martens joins the Department of Accounting from the Cass Business School, City University of London, where he was serving as a lecturer. He got his PhD in Accounting from the University of Mannheim and Goethe University Frankfurt. His fields of interest include capital market communication, non-traditional disclosure channels, non-traditional information intermediaries.
 
Lynn Wang, a new Assistant Professor, comes from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where she has just obtained a PhD.  Her research area is in the field of empirical financial accounting with a focus on the disclosure and accounting regulation of financial institutions. Her current studies address the role of non-financial information in the banking sector and its impact on banks’ stakeholders, including borrowers, depositors, and rivals.
 

Four new faculty, including a Full Professor, join the Department of Management and Technology.
 


Remus Ilies is a Full Professor of the Department of Management and Technology. He comes from the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School, where he was a Professor of Management. Before moving to NUS in 2011, he was Professor at Michigan State University. Professor Ilies received his PhD in Organizational Behavior/Human Resource Management from the University of Florida. His research examines numerous areas related to human resources and organizational behavior, such as personality, leadership, motivation, job attitudes, moods and emotions, and citizenship behaviors.
 
Miguel Espinosa, a PhD graduate in Economics at the London School of Economics, is a new Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Technology at Bocconi University. He was an Assistant Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and an Affiliated Professor at Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. His research interests include Industrial Organization, Organizational Economics, Labor Economics and Political Economy.
 
Aldona Kapačinskaitė joins the Department of Management and Technology as an Assistant Professor. She obtained a PhD in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. Her research mainly explores drivers of innovation and technological change. She is interested in how different types of environmental change affect knowledge flows and innovation within and across industry boundaries.
 
Heather H.J. Yang is a new Assistant Professor of the Department of Management and Technology at Bocconi University. She is a PhD in Behavioral & Policy Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also had teaching assistantship experiences. Her research examines the psychological factors that influence the use of and interaction with emergent technologies and their impact on individual and organizational decision-making.
 
 
There are four faculty members, including an Associate Professor, recruited by the Department of Marketing this year.
 


Sara Valentini joins the Department of Marketing as an Associate Professor. Her research focuses on the measurement and analysis of marketing effectiveness and customer profitability, especially in the fields of omnichannel marketing and customer relationship management. She served as elected Italian Representative of the Executive Board – European Marketing Academy (EMAC) with a three-year mandate. She holds a PhD in Marketing at the University of Bologna, where she was Associate Professor in Marketing.
 
Anwesha De, PhD in Marketing at Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, researches issues related to Social Media, Digital Marketing, Advertising, Branding, and New Product Innovations. She is joining the Department of Marketing as an Assistant Professor.
 
Qiaoni Shi is a new Assistant Professor at the Department of Marketing. She comes from the University of Pittsburgh, where she obtained her PhD student in Marketing. She is broadly interested in applying computational social science methods to understand consumer behavior and provide insights for firms.
 
Marton Varga, a PhD graduate in Marketing at INSEAD, joins Bocconi University as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Marketing. His main research focus is modeling online product search and purchase in the presence of user-generated content.
 
 
Two Assistant Professors join Bocconi Department of Social and Political Sciences.



Grace A. Ballor is a new Assistant Professor of the Department of Social and Political Sciences at Bocconi University. She earned her PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she also gained teaching experience.  She mainly focuses on issues related to European integration, economic globalization, and capitalism. 
 
A Stanford University PhD in Political Science, Scott Williamson comes to Bocconi from the New York University Abu Dhabi affiliated with the Department of Politics at New York University, where he’s been a Postdoctoral Associate. His primary research agenda explores the factors that sustain authoritarian rule, particularly in the Middle East. In his personal page, he showcases a selection of photos from his experiences researching, studying, and traveling in the Middle East.
 

The Departments of Economics, Finance, and Legal Studies, hired one new Assistant Professor each.


 
Jan David Bakker joins the Department of Economics from the University College London, where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow. He obtained his DPhil from the University of Oxford and has teaching experience both at Oxford and the London School of Economics. His research topics include international trade, regional and urban economics, development economics.
 
Matthias Rodemeier comes from the University of Muenster, where he’s just obtained his PhD, and joins Bocconi Department of Finance. He’s been Visiting Research Associate at the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago since 2019. He studies public economics, behavioral economics, and environmental economics with experimental methods.
 
Tommaso Trinchera obtained his PhD in Law of Business and Commerce from Bocconi University in 2016. Now, he comes back to Bocconi as an Assistant Professor. He’s been lecturing criminal law both at Bocconi and at the University of Turin. His main field of research is criminal law. He is the author of a number of publications on several topics, including legal theory, confiscation, crimes committed in labor and medical field, and criminal jurisdiction over offences committed abroad.

by Fabio Todesco and Weiwei Chen