Reputation. Real-world opportunities. Collegiality.
These are some of the reasons given for choosing Clark University by three new, tenure-track, assistant professors at Clark’s Graduate School of Management — Hamidreza (Hamid) Ahady Dolatsara, Fei Fang, and Da (Will) Wu — who will take up their positions on campus this fall.
Hamidreza (Hamid) Ahady Dolatsara is completing his doctorate in industrial and systems engineering at Auburn University this summer. He is a data scientist with research interests in health care analytics, finance, and transportation. Using data-driven studies, he employs and improves state-of-the-art, machine learning-based approaches to developing decision-support systems. As one example, he recently researched and developed a software tool that surgeons can use to predict a patient’s probability of survival after a heart transplant. In another project, he investigated the long-term financial well-being of companies and their association with the adoption of block-chain technology.
Ahady Dolatsara is keen on exploring new ideas that will have a positive impact on society, and says that Clark’s supportive research environment, and the collegiality exhibited by its faculty and staff, convinced him that Clark would be a good fit. He will be offering courses this fall in analytics programming and business intelligence.
With a doctorate degree in finance from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Fei Fang positions her research at the intersection of investments, derivatives, empirical asset pricing, volatility risk, and jump risk. In this context she poses questions designed to improve our understanding of how capital markets function, and to provide capital market participants with more transparency in asset-pricing mechanisms. Most recently, she has been examining connections between the options markets and the stock market at the firm level, and improving equity and option-pricing models.
Fang, who will be teaching investments, aims to create courses that help her students be emotionally connected, think analytically, and communicate cogently. She appreciates that Clark’s location in the Greater Boston area provides many real-world opportunities for both students and faculty, and she also values Clark for its reputation as a generator of high-quality research, and the quality of its academic programs.
With its focus on executive compensation and auditing quality, Da (Will) Wu’s research examines how compensation incentives affect risk-taking by corporate executives, and how market competition affects the quality of service provided by auditors. In the classroom, he uses experiential-learning techniques to build his students’ accounting knowledge and analytical skills. He will be teaching a course in principles of accounting.
Wu received a doctoral degree in accounting from the University of North Texas, and has held accounting positions with organizations such as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and CB Richard Ellis in Memphis, Tenn. He cites the opportunity to pursue excellence in both teaching and research, and students who are eager to learn from and work with faculty as among the reasons he chose to come to Clark.
Priscilla Elsass, dean of the Graduate School of Management, welcomes the new arrivals to the school’s faculty.
“Professors Ahady Dolatsara, Fang, and Wu bring impressive experience and skill to our teaching and research activities in finance, analytics, and accounting,” she says. “We are thrilled to have them join our faculty, and I’m eager to see the positive impact they have on the academic and professional experiences of our students and the Clark community.”
