PhD in Business Administration

Students

Doctoral Candidates

Naif Alawi - Information Systems
Email
Vita

Naif Alawi is a PhD candidate in the Information System and Decision Science Department. Prior to joining USF, he earned his bachelor’s degree in business management from the American University in Dubai and he completed his MBA at the American University in Washington, D.C. He also worked at Umm Al Qura University as a lecturer for a management course. His research interests include users’ behavior in crowdsourcing platforms, creativity in crowdsourcing, and AI integration in teams and collaboration environment.

Mohammad Alkhamees
Accountancy
Email
Vita

Rebecca Baaske - Accountancy
Email
Vita

Rebecca (Becca) Baaske is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in accounting. She works on research in auditing and AIS using experimental methodologies. Particularly, her research interests include the use of data analytics in auditing, corporate social responsibility, assurance/reporting, fraud brainstorming and various other judgment and decision-making topics within auditing. Baaske has presented at several accounting conferences, including the AIS section meetings, the Florida Behavioral Accounting Research Symposium and the 2019 Deloitte Doctoral Consortium. She has experience teaching the following courses: Audit (team-taught), AIS (solo and team-taught), and principles of financial accounting (solo). Prior to joining the doctoral program, she worked at PwC in Chicago, where she worked as a senior auditor in the Private Company Services Group.

Hilda Carrillo - Accountancy
Email
Vita

Hilda Carrillo is a doctoral candidate in the Lynn Pippenger School of Accountancy. Her general research interests include topics in auditing, financial reporting and accounting information systems. Specifically, her research examines issues of cognition, including the way information is framed and how that influences judgments and decision-making among audit stakeholders (e.g., investors, auditors, management, corporate governance boards, etc.). Carrillo, a licensed CPA, earned an MBA from the University of Dayton and a bachelor’s degree from Louisiana State University in Shreveport, Louisiana. Prior to entering academia, she worked in public accounting, helping both public and private industry clients and also served as a corporate accountant for a Fortune 500 company.

Moez Farokhnia - Information Systems
Email

Moez Farokhnia is a PhD candidate in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department at USF. He holds a master's degree degree in industrial engineering from Sharif University of Technology and a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology. He also has about three years of experience as supply chain development expert and entrepreneurial activities. His principal research interests include data analytics and applications of machine learning and operations research in cyber security and health informatics. His research in cyber security domain ranges from real-time detection of suspicious activities in EMR systems using optimal ensembles of anomaly detectors to design of robust models for optimal allocations of security controls. Toreinforce his research with rigorous causal inferences, he has also conducted experimental studies on the collaboration of AI and humans in cryptocurrencies market. Farokhnia uses variety of machine learning tools, operations research methods and econometrics models in his researches. He has also presented his researches at various conferences including WITS and WCBA. He also serves as an instructor of business application development and C# programming at USF.

Shawn Granitto
Email
Vita

Shawn Granitto is a PhD candidate at the Lynn Pippenger School of Accountancy. His general research interest is the use of accounting information systems (AIS) within an audit setting. Specifically, his research examines the use of data visualizations, data analytics, and anomaly detection techniques to interpret big data produced within the audit setting. Shawn has presented his research at the Florida Behavioral Accounting Research Symposium (FBARS) and has served as a discussant at the American Accounting Association (AAA) AIS Midyear Meeting. Prior to entering academia, Shawn earned his MAcc with a concentration in Information Systems from Florida Atlantic University and worked at Grant Thornton as a consultant.

Khalia Jenkins
Marketing
Email
Vita

Kimia Keshanian - Information Systems
Email

Kimia Keshanian is a third-year doctoral candidate in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department at the Muma College of Business. Prior to joining the doctoral program, she earned a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering and a master's degree in management information systems. Her research interests include, but are not limited to, mobile advertising and online advertising. She utilizes optimization techniques, in particular integer programming, and a variety of machine-learning techniques in her research to solve sophisticated problems in information systems domains involving high-dimensional datasets. Also, Keshanian has a track record of teaching undergraduate-level courses, such as systems analysis and design, at USF.

Ye Seul Kim
Marketing
Email
Vita

Yeseul Kim is a PhD candidate in marketing at the Muma College of Business. Before joining USF, she earned an MS and BA in Psychology from Korea University. She pursued the USF PhD program to apply what she learned in the discipline of psychology into the marketing area. Her major research topic is sensory marketing. Specifically, she investigates how visual components on websites affect online customer shopping behavior. Another stream of her research is digital marketing. She examines the effect of social media usage on users’ behavior. She teaches digital marketing at the undergraduate level.

Juliana Kralik
Accountancy
Email
Vita

Juliana Kralik is a doctoral candidate in the Lynn Pippenger School of Accountancy. She is interested in researching topics related to the auditing profession using qualitative and experimental methods. Specifically, her research examines the impact of the internal control over financial reporting audit on auditor judgement and decision making along with other challenges in the audit work environment and mechanisms to mitigate the challenges. Kralik also earned her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Accounting from USF. She has taught the Principles of Financial and Managerial Accounting courses as well as Accounting Information Systems. Prior to entering academia, she worked as an external auditor at EY in the Tampa Bay area and maintains an active CPA license.

Luke Liska - Marketing
Email
Vita

Luke Liska is a behavioral researcher with interests in digital and social media marketing, immersive virtual environments and social good. His research ranges from improving the lives of both humans and the environment to investigating the impact of the sky on our online shopping behaviors. Luke also develops virtual reality scenarios in Unity3D to use as a methodological tool to test marketing related concepts. Liska has presented his work at major conferences including, the American Marketing Association and the Academy of Marketing Science. He currently teaches digital marketing at USF and acts as a digital marketing consultant for firms in the marine and fish replica industries. Prior to entering the PhD program, he worked in the financial services industry where he developed and implemented digital marketing campaigns to generate business development opportunities and awareness.  He holds a master's degree marketing from the University of Denver and a bachelor's degree in accounting from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Abdallah Musmar - Information Systems
Email

Abdallah Musmar is a doctoral candidate in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department at USF. Prior to joining the doctoral program, Musmar earned a master's degree in information systems management from Carnegie Mellon University. He has extensive experience in the industry along with his academic research. He has experience in building a variety of machine-learning models on structured, unstructured and complex data types. Along with his studies, Abdallah is currently managing a machine learning team at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and is leading a Citizen Data Science initiative at the Muma College of Business. His research interests include studying social media implications on cryptocurrency price changes and applying deep learning models, specially sequence models, to improve Recommender Systems. His research interests also include implications of AI where he will be presenting his work on governing fake news propagation on social media at the Winter Conference on Business Analytics in March, 2020. Musmar has created and taught a class in management information systems at the University of Tampa between June 2016 and July 2017 at the undergraduate level.

Kirill Pervun - Finance
Email
Vita

Kirill Pervun is a PhD candidate in finance. His research interests include behavioral, corporate and entrepreneurial finance, investments, real estate and law and economics. His present research focuses on exploring links between manager personal characteristics and corporate decisions. His work has been presented at the Financial Management Association, the Southern Finance Association, the American Real Estate Society and the Florida Finance Conference. Prior to joining USF, Kirill worked as an attorney, a marketing intern at FedEx, a tennis coach, a door-to-door book and insurance salesman, a business consultant and founded his own commercial real estate business, BWT Global Investors. He earned his law degree in Russia, an MBA from the University of Memphis and master's degree in real estate with a concentration on finance from the University of Florida. He was a NCAA student-athlete on a full tennis scholarship and was inducted into the Athletic Director’s Academic Hall of Fame.

Samuel Sekar
Marketing
Email
Vita

Avijit Sengupta
Information Systems
Email

Deepti Singh - Information Systems
Email
Vita

Deepti Singh is a PhD candidate at the Muma College of Business at USF. Her research interests include health information technology, text mining, computational linguistics and econometrics. Her current research is focused on malpractice claims and effect of health IT policy with a focus on physician outcomes. Another stream of research focuses on physician decision-making based on socio-economic factors, which in turn affect health outcomes. Other notable research explored health information exchanges and their role in attenuating cost burden and quality challenges and understanding the mechanisms through which they can be successfully incorporated into health care routines for community welfare. Prior to joining USF, Singh had nine years of technical and managerial experience at Cisco Systems, where she led project development and testing teams for various product releases. She earned a master's degree in economics from the University of Florida. She currently serves as Student Liaison Officer in the Forum for Women in OR/MS (WORMS) of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). Her research portfolio encompasses privacy issues, IT-adoption impediments and cyber-vulnerabilities in the evolving landscape of health informatics. She continues to focus on technological innovation, adoption, diffusion use and outcomes in health care.

Raul Villamil-Otero
Accountancy
Email
Vita

Raul Villamil-Otero is a doctoral candidate in the Lynn Pippenger School of Accountancy. His general research interests include topics in auditing and accounting information systems. Specifically, his research examines team communication’s method, frequency, and nature and their effect on audit quality. Villamil-Otero is a licensed CPA, earned an MBA from North Carolina A&T State University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagϋez Campus.

Hao Wang - Marketing
Email

Hao Wang is a PhD candidate in marketing at the University of South Florida (USF). His research interests focus on selling and sales management. He has interests in empirically accessing managerially oriented research on issues related to salesforce effectiveness and/or digital marketing. His paper has been conditionally accepted to the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (FT50). He has also published research in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management. His research has been selected as a finalist for the 2021 James M. Comer Award for the Best Contribution to Selling and Sales Management Theory. One of his dissertation essays received the Best Doctoral Paper Award at the National Conference in Sales Management 2021. He presented his research at major academic conferences such as the American Marketing Association Conference, and the Academy of Management Annual Meeting. He also taught marketing research and will teach digital marketing at USF.

Zhihao Yu - Marketing
Email

Zhihao is a fourth-year doctoral candidate. His research interests lie within the domain of digital marketing and referral marketing by identifying presentation cues to enhance salesperson persuasiveness, customer online shopping intentions, and customer referral likelihood. His works employ diverse methods including laboratory experiments, qualitative research, field experiments, and empirical modeling. Zhihao has presented his work at major conferences such as AMA, ACR, SCP, and AMS. For the years prior to entering his PhD program, Zhihao worked in the luxury industry as a brand manager for several international luxury brands (Bang & Olufsen, Royal Asscher, etc.). As a former marketing practitioner with strong industry contacts, he is keen to collaborate with companies for his class and scientific studies to help solve their problems and capitalize on their opportunities.  As examples, he recently teamed up with companies to improve their sales effectiveness, their customers' online shopping experiences, and referral marketing practices. 

Doctoral Students