UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State Smeal College of Business welcomes 11 new members to its faculty this academic year.
Jing Pan joins the Department of Accounting as an assistant professor. She comes to Smeal from Southern Methodist University, where she was an assistant professor of accounting in the Cox School of Business. Pan holds a doctorate in accounting from the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. She earned her undergraduate degree from Sun Yat-Sen University in China and has two years of experience working as an Audit Associate at KPMG.
Delina Agnosteva and Patrick Higgins have joined the Department of Finance.
Agnosteva joins Smeal after serving as an assistant teaching professor at the Department of Economics at Penn State since 2019; prior to that, she held a tenure-track assistant professor position at the College of Business and Economics at Towson University. She holds a doctorate in economics from Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business, and a bachelor’s in economics and international business and mathematics from Ramapo College of New Jersey.
Higgins recently earned his master of business administration from Smeal, with concentrations in finance and applied leadership. He also holds a bachelor’s in agricultural science and horticulture from Penn State. Higgins has accumulated a wealth of experience in the private sector in a variety of functions. He has worked for TE Connectivity, Kunzler & Co. Inc., Cargill, Inc., Pepperidge Farm Inc., and the Hershey Company.
The Department of Management and Organization welcomes Travis Lesser as an instructor. He has served as an adjunct professor and entrepreneurship program coordinator at Smeal for nearly eight years. He holds a master of business administration from Smeal, with concentrations in marketing and entrepreneurship; and a bachelor’s in business administration, with a concentration in professional golf management, from Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Amin Zadeh joins the Department of Risk Management as a visiting associate professor. He had been a lecturer in Western University’s Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences since 2019. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Actuarial Science at the National University of Iran in Tehran. Zadeh earned a doctorate in statistics from the Universite de Montreal, a master’s in actuarial science from Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, and a bachelor’s in statistics from Allameh Tabataba'i University in Tehran.
The Department of Supply Chain and Information Systems welcomes six new members: Jing Tian, Lina Wang, Serkan Yilmaz, Qian Chen, Lu Huang and Olga Pak.
Tian comes to Smeal from Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business where she was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Center for Digital Innovation. Tian holds a doctorate in information management and information systems from Fudan University in Shanghai, China, a bachelor’s in management information systems from Tianjin University in Tianjin, China, and a bachelor’s in finance from Nankai University in Tianjin.
Wang joins Smeal after spending a year at Georgia Southern University as an assistant professor in the Department of Logistics and Supply Chain Management. She earned her doctorate in supply chain management from Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of Business. Prior to pursuing her doctorate, she was a senior manager working with supply chain at Walmart, both in the United States and China.
Yilmaz joins Smeal after spending more than 15 years in the private sector, in a wide variety of industry engineering, research and teaching positions. He holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering and a master’s in nuclear engineering, both from Penn State. He earned master’s and bachelor’s degrees in nuclear engineering from Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey.
Chen comes to Smeal after serving as an assistant professor in marketing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln since 2020. She earned her doctorate in business administration (quantitative marketing) from Penn State. She holds a master’s in statistics and urban and regional planning from the University of Minnesota, and a bachelor’s in economics and geographical science and remote sensing from Peking University in Beijing, China.
Huang was previously an assistant professor of marketing at Kean University in Union, New Jersey. Prior to that, he taught at New York Institute of Technology, as an assistant professor of marketing, and as a research and teaching assistant at the University of Connecticut. Prior to his stint at UConn, Huang worked as an engineer at Samsung Electronics. He holds a doctorate in marketing and a master’s in agricultural economics, both from UConn. He earned a master’s in economics from Shandong University in Jinan, China, and a bachelor’s in applied physics from School of the Gifted Young at the University of Science and Technology of China.
Pak has been a visiting assistant professor at Smeal for the past three years. She completed her doctorate in management science at the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business. Pak has also earned a master’s in economics from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and a bachelor’s in business administration from Indiana University.