New Faculty Fall 2006 - McCombs School of Business - The University of Texas at Austin

Carlos Corona joins McCombs after obtaining his Ph.D. in accounting from Stanford University. A native of Spain, Corona earned an MBA from IESE Business School in Barcelona. His research interests include the increasing importance of intangible assets in modern economies, and earnings management as a relational outcome.

Volker Laux obtained his Ph.D. in business administration from Frankfurt’s Goethe University. He taught at Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor of accounting, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Columbia University. Laux’s research interests encompass organizational design, management control systems and executive compensation.

Lillian Mills has been an associate professor of accounting at the University of Arizona since 2003, where she taught undergraduate and graduate classes in federal and international taxation. Among her research interests are tax compliance and international taxation.

Yanhua (Sunny) Yang received her Ph.D. in accounting from the University of Colorado at Boulder where she taught introductory and intermediate accounting. Licensed as a CPA in her native China, Yang is researching the discipline effect of cash flow forecasts on earnings management, and reverse stock splits.

Yong Yu’s education background includes an accounting Ph.D. from Penn State, and an economics master’s degree from Tulane University. His research focuses on the behavior of institutional investors, and the role of financial analysts as informational intermediaries. Yu also has worked as an auditor in his home country of China.

Finance Department

Bing Han comes to McCombs from Ohio State University where he was an assistant professor of finance. Han holds a Ph.D. in finance from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago. Investment theory, behavioral finance and risk management are among his research interests.

Alok Kumar’s previous teaching post was as an assistant professor of finance at Notre Dame. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University, and his management master’s degree from Yale University. Kumar’s research involves issues such as investor over-confidence, racially directed stock investments and behavioral biases for newly public firms.

Information, Risk, and Operations Management (IROM)

Qi (Annabelle) Feng moved to Austin from the University of Texas at Dallas where she obtained her Ph.D. in operations management and taught operations and production management to undergraduates. Feng has worked as a research associate for Hewlett-Packard and a business consultant for Arthur Anderson in Shanghai, China. Optimal control and dynamic programming, inventory control and supply chain management and models of economic growth are some of Feng’s research interests.

Belgium-native Dorothee Honhon received her Ph.D. in operations management from New York University. Honhon obtained her MBA from Belgium’s University of Liege. Her research concentrates on large-scale dynamic programming, assortment planning, inventory management and retail operations management.

Ramandeep Randhawa comes to Texas from Stanford where he completed a Ph.D. in business operations, information and technology. Randhawa taught revenue optimization to Stanford MBA students. Service operations, stochastic models and mechanical design are some of Randhawa’s research topics.

Management Department

Martin Kilduff comes to Texas from Penn State where he served as professor of organizational behavior. His Ph.D. was obtained at Cornell University, and his MBA at Washington State University. Kilduff’s research areas include behavioral decision theory, organizational behavior, social networks and strategic decision-making.

Francisco Polidoro Jr. obtained his Ph.D. in corporate strategy from the University of Michigan. From 1988-2001, Polidoro worked for Mercedes-Benz in the areas of human resources, project management and sales and marketing.

Violina Rindova joins McCombs from the Department of Management and Organization at the University of Maryland. She obtained her Ph.D. from New York University, her MBA from Madrid Business School and her JD from Bulgaria’s Sophia University.

Marketing Department

Garrett Sonnier’s Ph.D. came from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, with a one-year stint at the University of Chicago as a visiting student. He has worked as a strategic planning and research manager for Toyota, and as an economist for the United States Department of Agriculture.

For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.