Harbert welcomes new early-career faculty members

The Harbert College of Business welcomes new assistant professors Ben Lazarine, Amy Mathews and Allison Smith, who are beginning their faculty careers with the Departments of Business Analytics and Information Systems, Marketing and the School of Accountancy.

In addition to these three early-career faculty, Harbert also welcomed distinguished scholars David Dobrzykowski, Bickerstaff Endowed Chair and department chair of Supply Chain Management, and Yi-Jen “Ian” Ho, the Broadway Distinguished Professor of Information Systems.

“We are pleased to have these exceptional individuals be a part of our faculty,” said Harbert Dean Jennifer Mueller-Phillips. “Together, they strengthen our ability to deliver an exceptional student experience and pursue high-impact research that advances our mission.”

Ben Lazarine, an assistant professor of information systems, conducts research focused on managing security vulnerabilities inherent in open-source AI software by addressing issues early in the app development cycle.

In his doctoral dissertation at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, he identified secure AI building blocks that developers can leverage in their app design, and he introduced a large language model approach to address persistent security concerns later in the development cycle.

“Open-source development builds on existing technologies and they’re not all equal — some are more secure than others,” he said.

By identifying secure AI packages, Lazarine added, developers are more likely to experience success with their projects from a security perspective.

At Auburn, his research will explore how his proposed solutions work in practice. 

“With the rate of AI development today being lightning fast, I’m really interested in understanding what happens when developers actually use [the systems I developed],” said Lazarine, who teaches Business Applications with Open-Source Software and is a co-principal investigator on a newly funded $1.18 million National Science Foundation project to enhance the resilience and security of open source AI software.  

Among his accolades, Lazarine won two prestigious Kelley School of Business awards for his research — the Alan Dennis Fellowship and Robert James Waller Fellowship.  The Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) also recognized him with its Outstanding Reviewer Award.

He co-authored a paper that addressed vulnerabilities in cloud computing, which was published in the Journal of Management Information Systems, a premier research publication.

Lazarine is excited to start his faculty career in Harbert College’s Department of Business Analytics and Information Systems because of the established cybersecurity expertise and externally funded faculty research.

“When you start to meld all this together, Auburn really [is] an amazing place for me to start my career, plus there are great research colleagues,” said Lazarine, whose work successfully secured external research funding from the National Science Foundation while at Indiana — a rare feat for a graduate student. 

In his spare time, he enjoys playing and watching basketball and going to the movies. He has attended more 200 concerts and is a big fan of 1980s new wave bands.

 

Accounting Assistant Professor Amy Mathews always wanted to be a teacher. Initially, she thought she’d teach math to high schoolers, but as an undergraduate at Auburn she discovered an affinity for accounting.

With guidance and encouragement from Harbert College of Business faculty, she determined that being a university faculty member was a better career path for her because she could teach the next generation of business students while creating new knowledge through research.

“I was lucky to have really great mentors at Auburn — people who encouraged my desire to learn and my interest in [academia],” said Mathews, who received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Auburn. “Once I graduated and I’d circle back to them, they were still incredibly supportive of me pursuing that dream.”

After becoming a CPA, Mathews worked in assurance at PwC in Nashville, performing audits for clients in the banking capital markets and asset wealth management industries. After three years she started a doctoral program in accounting at The University of Alabama, where she won a highly competitive National Association of State Board of Accountancy (NASBA) education research grant and honed her instructional skills teaching classes like corporate governance, financial accounting and corporate financial reporting.

At Auburn, she uses mixed methods (surveys and interviews) to explore the job factors that motivate high-quality work, contribute to stress or lead to job turnover among early-career auditors. She is teaching Intermediate Accounting (ACCT 5110).

She’s delighted to launch her faculty career at Auburn, and she looks forward to mentoring students and collaborating with colleagues.

“It’s a dream come true,” said Mathews, who looks forward to providing Auburn students with the same type of support she received as a student. “For me it always comes back to the people…and I think the people at Auburn are some of the best. The School of Accountancy is extremely well run and it’s an environment where I can grow personally as an educator and as a researcher.”

In her spare time, she enjoys watching tv drama shows, traveling and hiking with her husband, who is also an Auburn graduate and CPA. They have visited numerous national parks, including the Grand Canyon and Zion.

 

Allison Smith, an assistant professor of marketing, traces her interest in the field back to her high school and undergraduate days when she was a salesperson at her family’s furniture store in Terre Haute, Ind.

“I became fascinated with trying to better understand how salespeople can best assist customers,” she said. “That led me to major in marketing and accounting at Indiana State University…thinking I might take over the family business one day, except I did some research [on sales] and fell in love with it and decided I wanted to become a marketing professor.”

Her research interests include salespeople’s effectiveness and customer outcomes, salespeople’s incentives and motivation, and strategic salesforce management.

Smith recently completed her Ph.D. in marketing at the University of South Florida (USF), where she won the 2026 American Marketing Association’s Sales SIG Doctoral Dissertation Proposal award for her research investigation that found the most effective salespeople use a consistent blend of cognitive and emotional language to be successful. She also received the prestigious Hunt/Deitz/Hansen Best Doctoral Paper award, which recognizes the top Ph.D. student paper in professional selling.

While at USF, she taught professional selling courses, winning the 2025 Muma College of Business Ph.D. Student Excellence in Teaching award. At Auburn, she is teaching Personal Selling (MKTG 4390).

Smith was drawn to Auburn primarily because of the collegial and collaborative culture in the Department of Marketing and Harbert College of Business.

“The people are great — students, faculty and leadership,” she said. “You can tell they love working together and they love what they do. It’s an environment that would allow me to be challenged but also supported. I’m excited to be surrounded by academics who are doing such great research, which will allow me to take my research to the next level.”

The Auburn area also appealed to her.

“Auburn’s broader community will be a wonderful place to raise a family,” said Smith, who enjoys outdoor activities like biking and hiking with her husband and young daughter. They look forward to attending Auburn sporting events.

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