Alok Kumar, Cesarano Scholar and professor of finance
	George Korniotis, assistant professor of finance
	Christopher Parmeter, assistant professor ofeconomics
	Claudia Townsend, assistant professor of marketing

The School of Business Administration this semester welcomes four new faculty members who join the School from leading business schools as well as the Federal Reserve System. Alok Kumar has been appointed the Cesarano Scholar and a professor of finance. Prior to joining the School, Kumar was an associate professor of finance for four years at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Kumar, who earned his PhD from Cornell University, specializes in behavioral finance, empirical asset pricing, corporate finance and computational economics.

George Korniotis joins the School as an assistant professor of finance. Most recently Korniotis was an economist with the Risk Analysis Section of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for four years. Prior to that Korniotis, who earned his PhD from Yale University, was an assistant professor of finance at the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. His research areas include asset pricing, behavioral finance, individual investor behavior and risk management.

Christopher Parmeter has been appointed as assistant professor of economics. Parmeter, who earned his PhD from Binghamton University, was most recently an assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University for four years. His research interests include constrained nonparametric estimation and inference, application of hedonic methods, robust benefit transfer and growth empirics.

Claudia Townsend joins the School as an assistant professor of marketing after earning her PhD from the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously, Townsend served as a senior project manager and analytics manager at online market research firm BuzzBack Market Research. Her research interests include judgment and decision making, behavioral decision theory, aesthetics and product design in choice and self concept and consumer choice.

“These appointments further illustrate the great success the UM School of Business has experienced in faculty recruitment over the past several years,” said Dean Barbara E. Kahn. “A key part of our strategy to achieve global preeminence is based on research excellence and by bringing on this distinguished group, we take another step toward achieving our vision.”

These appointments follow a number of other appointments of faculty who have joined the School from such leading universities as Duke, MIT, and Harvard in recent years as part of the School’s strategy to build its international research reputation. The program has not gone unnoticed. In 2010, the School was ranked No. 40 in the world for research by the Financial Times, up from No. 58 in 2007. Also in 2010, the International Business Review ranked the School No. 20 in the world for international research, ahead of such elite institutions as Harvard University and the London Business School.