Rotman PhDs and Faculty Members Honoured for Their Research.

Toronto – Five past and current PhD students in the areas of finance, accounting, and operations management from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management along with a new faculty member in strategic management have been awarded honours and scholarships for their research papers and proposals. 
 
Shengzhe Tang, a PhD student in finance at the Rotman School, has won a Canadian Derivatives Exchanges scholarship of $20,000 from the Montreal Exchange for the 2014/15 academic year. Tang applied to the program with a research project to study liquidity and market making cost dynamics in the equity option market. The scholarship was announced in June. 
 
Leila Peyravan, a PhD student in accounting at the Rotman School, has been awarded a Robert Bertram Doctoral Research Award of $15,000 from the Canadian Foundation for Governance Research. Her research project will examine the effect of dual-ownership of activist investors on the target firm’s accounting quality.
 
Laura Doering who joined the Rotman School this month as an assistant professor of strategic management, won the 2014 Burt Graduate Student Paper Award from the American Sociological Association's Economic Sociology Section. Her paper, "Rethinking Escalation of Commitment: Relational Lending in Microfinance," was completed as part of Prof. Doering’s PhD at the University of Chicago. 
 
Two Rotman PhDs students won awards in the student competition at the 2014 conference of the Canadian Operational Research Society. Jianfu (Jeff) Wang, who graduated from the PhD program in December, won the Queueing Special Interest Group student competition award for his paper “Using strategic idleness to improve customer service experience in service network,” which was published in Operations Research in 2013. The paper was co-authored with Rotman Professors Opher Baron, Oded Berman, and Dmitry Krass. Current PHD student Vahid Sarhangian was selected as the runner up for the Student Paper Competition (Open Category) for his paper, ”Allocation policies in blood transfusion.” This paper was co-authored with Rotman Profs.  Baron and Berman and Prof. Hossein Abouee-Mehrizi of the University of Waterloo. 
 
Youli Zou, a graduate of the Rotman PhD program, will receive the 2014 Best Dissertation Award in Financial Accounting (FARS) from the American Accounting Association at the organization’s annual meeting in August. Her dissertation was on “Strategic Entry Decisions, Accounting Signals, and Risk Management Disclosure.”  She is currently an assistant professor in accountancy at George Washington University.
 
The Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto is redesigning business education for the 21st century with a curriculum based on Integrative Thinking. Located in the world’s most diverse city, the Rotman School fosters a new way to think that enables the design of creative business solutions.  For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca.
 
-30-

For more information:
 
Ken McGuffin
Manager, Media Relations
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto
Voice 416.946.3818
E-mail mcguffin@rotman.utoronto.ca
Follow Rotman on Twitter @rotmanschool
Watch Rotman on You Tube www.youtube.com/rotmanschool