College Announces Two Department Chairs and Welcomes New Faculty Members

With the new academic year comes some changes to the College of Business with two new chairs and several full-time faculty. Dr. Peter VanderHart, professor, was appointed chair of the economics department, replacing Dr. Mary Ellen Benedict who retired in the spring. Dr. Susan Kleine was named the chair of the marketing department, replacing Dr. Bob Wu who also retired. Dr. Kleine is an associate professor and has been serving as the Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at the University.

Joining the College of Business this fall are the following faculty members:

Department of Marketing

Dr. Fei Weisstein, Assistant Professor.  Dr. Weisstein comes from The University of Texas – Pan American where she was an assistant professor of marketing.  Her research interests include pricing and marketing strategy, social media and digital marketing, online consumer behavior, IT-mediated customer service and consumer decision making. Dr. Weisstein has received several research paper awards and academic excellence awards. She earned her Ph.D. in marketing in 2009 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from San Francisco State University. Her industry experience includes merchandising positions at WonLong Hong Kong Limited.

Department of Applied Statistics and Operations Research

Dr. Íbrahim Çapar, Assistant Professor.   Dr. Çapar recently earned his Ph.D. in Operations Management from the University of Alabama as well as a master’s in operations management and an MBA. His research interests include vehicle and patrol routing, online optimization, integer programming, and heuristics. Dr. Çapar is a Certified Analytics Professional and holds a Data Mining certificate. He has been serving as an instructor at the University of Alabama.

Dr. Arkajyoti Roy, Assistant Professor.  Dr. Roy earned his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University in 2015 and has been a Pre-doctoral Fellow in Industrial Engineering and Management Science at Northwestern University.  Dr. Roy has also been a clinical researcher at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago since 2013. He has received a best paper award and named best teaching assistant two consecutive years at Purdue.

Mr. Nathan Baxter, Instructor.  Baxter is currently working on his Ph.D. in statistics at BGSU and earned his Master’s in Applied Mathematics at the University of Florida.  He has been an instructor at the University of Findlay and at the University of Northwestern Ohio. Most recently he has been a graduate teaching assistant in BGSU’s Department of Mathematics.

His research interests include inequality constrained models, multiple comparisons, and automatic and objective Bayesian prior selection.

Department of Economics

Ms. Rachel Childers, Instructor.  Childers is returning to her alma mater where she earned her undergraduate economics degree in 2009 and master’s in economics in 2010.  She is finishing her doctorate education in economics at the University of Kansas with her primary research interest in applied microeconomics. Other research and teaching interests include game theory, financial economics, and econometrics. She taught game theory and microeconomics at the University of Kansas prior to coming to BGSU.

Dr. Samuel Enajero, Instructor. Enajero has been a lecturer at the University of Michigan-Dearborn since 1999 while also teaching at Central Michigan University.  He earned his Ph.D. in Economics in 2000 from Wayne State University with a primary research interest in public choice, public finance and industrial organization.  Dr. Enajero has published numerous research articles about higher education as well as a book analyzing historical and contemporary institutions.

Department of Finance

 A new executive-in-residence teaching in the new insurance specialization is J. Rockne Starks. He brings years of executive experience from Citizens Financial Group as the Senior Vice President, Director, Corporate Insurance and Safety. His expertise is in financial institution risk and insurance and specialties include management liability, property and casualty insurance, workers compensation, BOLI, and self-insurance.

In a new partnership with Tianjin Polytechnic University in China, four visiting scholars  will be teaching at BGSU until February. They include the following professors and their research expertise:  Dr. Zhi Li - industrial automation and information technology; Dr. Chenggong Lyu - business analytics and data mining; Dr. Ye Liu - applied statistics; and Dr. Jun Wu - database management.

Two faculty and staff changes have occurred with other departments.  Ms. Edith (Edie) Busija who was an instructor in the management department has moved to the Department of Marketing to teach business communications, BA 1500 (Overview of Business Administration), and the BizX Applied Business Experience lab courses.  Ms. Sandi Salenbien has joined the Department of Management as the administrative assistant, moving from the Dallas-Hamilton Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership.