Dear Friends of the Department of Accounting,  

I am honored and humbled to become the chair of this great department. I have been a faculty member at the Fox School for 12 years. During that time, our department benefited tremendously from the leadership of the former chair, Eric Press. I will do my very best to continue that strong tradition of leadership. 

Now is a very exciting time for our department. We are positioned with a strong team of faculty, staff and students. Our faculty is composed of highly-accomplished research and practice professors who are nationally and internationally recognized. For example, Associate Dean Sudipta Basu was recently named the American Accounting Association’s inaugural Yuji Ijiri Lecturer on Foundations of Accounting, a prestigious lectureship sponsored by five global accounting associations. 

This fall, we hired Hyun Jong Park, an outstanding young scholar in auditing research. Together with Jagan Krishnan and Jayanthi Krishnan, a strong and accomplished group of auditing researchers. We also added considerable breadth to our faculty with Jose Munoz, who brings years of experience in the C-suite and teaching. Read on to learn about their research interests, approach to teaching and more. 

We are a very productive group of scholars. Over the past year, faculty published in top journals on topics such as internal control weaknesses and remediation, director liability reduction laws, executive compensation and taxation, health IT investments, international M&A and the market for control, and investor relations officers and disclosure.  

In the classroom, we continue to focus on developing critical thinking, decision making and problem-solving skills which offers us the agility to fold in new technologies and trends as they emerge. We know that today’s accounting students need to be able to use data analytics in problem-solving and decision making and to use the appropriate data tools. For example, Cory Ng has designed an undergraduate course in data analytics in accounting covering topics and tools such as robotic process automation, SQL, Alteryx and Tableau. In other accounting major courses, we have integrated cases and projects using tools including Tableau, Excel and ACL. Similar courses have been added to our Master of Accountancy program.

I have very high expectations that our faculty will continue to deliver outstanding teaching and professional development for our students, and will impact the profession through timely and relevant research. 

As always, you will get full disclosure in Footnotes from Fox. Go Owls!

Best regards,

Betsy