The Harbert College of Business welcomes five new tenure-track faculty this semester—Paige Csere, Hao Ding, Eric Negangard, Stacey Robinson and Yifan Zhang. Their teaching and research focus on topics in accounting, business analytics and information systems, and marketing.

Accounting Assistant Professor Paige Csere is glad to return to her alma mater.

“Auburn is a really special place, but the main thing that drew me here is this feeling of being home,” said Csere, who credits Harbert College of Business faculty for inspiring her to earn a doctorate and pursue a faculty career. 

As a master’s of accountancy degree student, Csere recalls a panel discussion featuring Professors James Long, Duane Brandon, Tina Loraas, and Jennifer Mueller-Phillips who described what it was like conducting research and teaching at the college level. 

“I’d never heard people talk about their work the way they did,” she said. “They were so happy and satisfied. I thought maybe that could be me.”

After earning her master’s and passing the CPA exam, Csere worked as a senior associate with KPMG performing audits for a large public client and smaller retail and non-profit clients for three years before enrolling in the accounting doctorate program at Emory University. 

At Emory, she received several fellowships, including a prestigious Deloitte Foundation Doctoral Fellowship, which is awarded annually to 10 top PhD candidates across the United States. 

Her dissertation examined the team-related factors that facilitate and hinder auditors’ willingness to modify their chosen audit procedures. A key part of completing her dissertation was conducting experiments with practicing auditors—a process that was facilitated by her winning a 2023 American Accounting Association/Center for Audit Quality Access to Audit Personnel grant.  

As a new faculty member, Csere is conducting audit-related research by conducting experimental and qualitative studies to better understand the issues that affect auditors’ judgement and decision-making processes. 

Outside of work, she enjoys shopping, reading, and taking spin classes. She also enjoys watching a good Netflix series.

Hao Ding conducts research that applies causal inference and machine learning methods to healthcare operations, socially responsible operations and digitalization. As he launches his faculty career at Auburn, he has published three impactful research papers in top-tier business journals.

His paper on gender inequality in research productivity during the COVID pandemic lockdowns was selected as a finalist for two national best research paper awards and was covered by NBC and Fox News media outlets. In this study, Ding and his co-authors found that young women faculty members at top-ranked universities experienced a significant drop in productivity compared to their male counterparts when the Covid lockdowns forced many individuals to work from home.

“I’m proud of this paper because it was timely,” said Ding, an assistant professor of business analytics and information systems. “It also has been cited more than 330 times on Google Scholar and was a finalist for the 2023 INFORMS DEI Best Student Paper award and the Manufacturing and Operations Management (M&SOM) Best Paper award.”

Ding also conducts research on two other pressing societal issues. He is investigating the intensifying nursing crisis in the United States through the lens of nursing productivity. He also is working with physicians to analyze the effect of asynchronous telemedicine adoption.

At Auburn, he is teaching Data Management and Acquisition, which introduces students to the process of managing, extracting and analyzing information stored in databases.

“This is great for me because that’s exactly what I did for Roadie, a startup company in Atlanta,” Ding said, referring to his data scientist internship that he held while completing his doctorate at Emory University. “I’m excited to share [this experience] with the students.”

He was drawn to Auburn because of the collegiality among Harbert College of Business and Department of Business Analytics and Information Systems faculty, as well as the “vibrant yet quiet environment” of the city. An avid football fan, he looks forward to attending Auburn Tiger football games at Jordan Hare stadium.

A fan of road trips, Ding has traveled to all 50 states since coming to the United States from China to earn his bachelor’s degree in Operations Management, Finance and Accounting at Indiana University. He also enjoys playing competitive badminton and camping.

Throughout his career in academia and at a Big Four accounting firm, Eric Negangard has worked to prevent and detect accounting fraud and misconduct, while understanding the field’s use of innovation and technology. He even exchanged letters with imprisoned financier Bernie Madoff, who was convicted of running a multi-billion-dollar securities fraud Ponzi scheme.

“It was a really fascinating relationship,” said Negangard. “I got his take on the events that transpired, and he was open and honest about it. It helped me with some of my research.”

Negangard said he rereads those letters often and gains new insights on Madoff, who died in prison in 2021.

“I think we can learn a lot from people who take a wrong path—the way they process [their actions] and defend and rationalize what they did,” he said.

Negangard joins the Auburn faculty from the University of Virginia, where he won the 2023 AAA Forensic Section Research Conference Best Paper award. In his teaching, he developed several data analytics case studies that were adopted by faculty at scores of universities worldwide. He also helped elevate their data analytics offerings across the entire curriculum, which ultimately led to the accounting master’s degree program being STEM certified.

A sports enthusiast, Negangard helped recruit student-athletes for Virginia’s sports teams, teaching and mentoring some of the students in the business school.

At Auburn, Negangard aims to continue his research on the digital transformation in accounting. He will also commercialize a digital ledger technology that uses block chain, smart contracts and non-fungible tokens to track and report carbon emissions, which he developed with Auburn Professor Greg Jenkins and John Carroll University Professor Mark Sheldon.

He is teaching Intermediate Financial Accounting, a course he says will “give me the opportunity to show students just how rewarding a career in accounting can be.”  He also aims to develop courses in accounting analytics and accounting fraud.

Earlier in his career, Negangard spent seven years at KPMG in forensic accounting, investigating alleged white-collar crime internationally.

He and his wife spend their free time watching their two young sons play soccer, baseball and flag football. He also enjoys scuba diving, boating and riding dirt bikes.

Stacey Robinson was motivated to pursue a faculty career while working as a vice president for a major bank in North Carolina, where she realized she was finding temporary solutions to marketing-related problems without fulling understanding the underlying issues.

“I realized then that I wanted to be researching and assessing issues,” said Robinson, who was working on her MBA at Meredith College at the time. She eventually left banking to earn a PhD in marketing at Florida State University. “I could keep putting a band-aid on an issue for the rest of my [industry] career, or I could work to understand why it’s an issue and how to resolve it.”

She joins the Auburn faculty as an associate professor of marketing. Her research and teaching focus on consumer behavior, examining everything from front-line service employee actions to consumer behavior-based strategy. She has published her work in top marketing publications, including the Journal of Marketing and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. She also serves as senior editor for the Journal of Business Research.

Prior to joining the Harbert faculty, Robinson was an associate professor and marketing doctoral program coordinator at the University of Alabama, where she won the American Marketing Association SERVSIG Best Paper of the Year award in 2016.

“I’m most proud of my students’ accomplishments—from undergraduates to PhDs—and the small part I’ve played in assisting or mentoring them,” said Robinson, who regularly brought small groups of students to the annual National Retail Federation conference in New York City, where they could learn about research and industry issues.

One of Robinson’s students, she said, changed his major after unexpectedly attending one of her lectures.

“He was a geology major, and he was talking to his [marketing major] friend in the classroom the first day of the semester when I started to lecture,” she recounted. “He stayed because he felt rude leaving. He ended up switching his major to marketing, then earned his master’s and is now in a PhD program at Texas A&M.”

A fitness enthusiast, Robinson completed her first half-marathon in 2023. She also enjoys cooking and traveling to international conferences.

Yifan Zhang, an assistant professor of business analytics, measures his teaching success partly by the number of students he influences to pursue this critical field.

“I’m not saying everyone should do analytics, but sometimes students are afraid of the subject because they think it’s math intensive,” said Zhang, who teaches introductory business analytics and predictive modeling. “[Business analytics] is more about defining a problem, deciding which tools to use to solve the problem and presenting the results to influence business decisions.”

His research explores the affect AI and machine learning technologies have on business operations and society.

“As more and more businesses use AI and machine learning, I [examine] whether the technology impacts everyone equally or whether it produces any undesirable results,” he said.

“We need to make sure the algorithms we use treat people equally.”

He also applies his quantitative marketing expertise to draw actionable insights from consumer behavior so businesses can optimize their marketing efforts. He has published his research in top-tier journals and is also the recipient of several research award including the INFORMS Information Systems Society cluster best paper award.

Before joining the Harbert College of Business, Zhang was an assistant professor at Kennesaw State University Coles College of Business, where he won the Outstanding Publication Award.

According to Zhang, he was drawn to Auburn because of the great colleagues and ample resources at Harbert College. The college’s aspiration to become one of the leading business schools in the country also played a role in his decision, he said.

Zhang earned his PhD in quantitative marketing from Penn State University, where he won the Haring Symposium Best Paper Award and the Smeal College of Business Paul Anderson Dissertation Award.

In his free time, he enjoys playing various video games and lifting weights.

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