HEC Accelerates its Recruitment Drive for Top Research Professors

HEC Paris continues its campaign to recruit world-class research professors with the arrival of 14 new academics to its faculty ranks. This maintains its long-term objective of becoming one of the world's research hubs. The academics join the Finance, Economics & Decision Sciences, Marketing, Management & HR, Strategy & Business Policies, Accounting & Management Control, and Information Systems & Operations Management (ISOM) departments, swelling the HEC’s total of research professors to 126.

On top of this year’s recruitment of 14 Tenured Track Faculty (TTF) members are five Education Track Faculty (ETF) teachers (Amer Madi, Emmanuel Coblence, Peter Fischer, Anne Frisch, and François Gemenne), some of whom also conduct vigorous research projects.

The Finance and Accounting departments enjoyed the greatest number of recruits with four each. Three more were hired by the Strategy Department, while Marketing, MHR, Economics and IS OM recruited two professors apiece.

The new HEC professors have a great diversity of research interests including some highly original studies. Assistant Professor Finia Kuhlmann, for example, has been studying accounting frameworks for survivors of modern slavery, as well as questions of vulnerability within a neoliberal regime of social care. The works of Marketing Assistant Professor Craig Anderson has attracted high media attention largely thanks to his interest in the healing effect of the emotion of awe on veterans’ Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In the marketing field, he also explores how emotions impact consumer behavior, social relationships, and well-being.

Assistant Professor of Operations Management, Vassilis Digalakis, meanwhile, explores large-scale analytics and interpretable machine learning methodologies. These are topics Digalakis has been studying for five years at MIT, to facilitate the adoption of data-driven decision support tools, primarily in sustainability and healthcare. Closer to home, Associate Professor Lisa Baudot arriving from ESSEC, has won several awards for her publications on conflicts over work hours across hierarchical levels in public accounting, as well as for her study of an ethic of accountability.

Rich Diversity of Research

Assistant Professor Waqar Ali sheds light on the real effects of accounting choice and debt contracting, fields he’s been exploring at INSEAD since 2018. The economist Ciaran Rogers, meanwhile, studies the price of real assets and inflation with a focus on US asset markets in the Seventies. He's also published a paper on a New Keynesian model with a banking system.

Former Bocconi University academic Mario Amore has built up a global reputation for his research on corporate governance, family business and strategy. He is a Schwarz Foundation Chaired Professor of Strategy and Family Business. His papers have shown how leaders influence (un)ethical behaviors within organizations, and he has also studied questions of corporate ownership and antitrust violations.

For decades, issues centered on ethics have dominated the research by renowned climate specialist François Gemenne, co-author of the IPCC report. Hailing from Liège University, he has made major contributions to questions of environmental politics and diplomacy, as well as research on environmentally-induced migration. On top of his research, Gemenne will be directing the school’s accrued engagement in sustainability studies.

Interdisciplinary Approaches Gaining Ground

The research by new HEC professors Leandro Nardi, Paul Voss, Peter Fischer, Quirin Fleckenstein, Flore Sentenac, Vincent Maurin, Stephen Impink and Anne Frisch have also been making major inroads in their respective fields of study. Strategy professor Nardi, who has already spent two years as a research fellow at HEC, explores the vast intersection between social performance and management. Finance professor Voss, arriving from Vienna’s Central European University, has published on shareholder governance and the efficiency of separating ownership and information. Former St. Gallen co-director of Best Practice in Marketing, Peter Fischer continues his research on decision-making in the age of technology in the international marketing context. As for Quirin Fleckenstein, his research focus is on macro-finance, financial intermediation, and corporate finance. A recent working paper he published is on the myth of the lead arranger’s share.

Flore Sentenac, meanwhile, will arrive in the ISOM department in January 2024 with a glittering record, including winning the L’Oréal-UNESCO Young Talent Award for Women in Science last year. Sentenac was rewarded for her work in the Applied Mathematics and Bioinformatics category. Accounting professor and Academic Director of Custom Executive programs, Anne Frisch, already has a long relation with HEC, stretching back to her MiM in 1987. Frisch explores how companies and banks have a crucial role to play to enhance planetary boundaries and transition to a low-carbon economy.

Fellow-TTF finance professor Vincent Maurin works on topics such as financial market structure and the role of collateral, as well as cryptocurrencies.Jamie Hentall MacCuish’s research is in the field of public economics, which often overlaps with labour economics. It particularly focuses on the determinants of inequality and the economic implications of the limitations of human cognition.

Finally, Stephen Impink arrives from the Stern School of Business with an impressive number of top-class publications and media contributions on digital entrepreneurship, innovation and the future of work. He investigates ethical data and AI in startups, drawing from his long years of experience as a Senior Manager at Microsoft in global marketing and sales strategy.

All these long-term explorations will be featured regularly in our upcoming reports for the Newsroom and Knowledge@HEC. These additions to a burgeoning community of professors mark a strong commitment by HEC Paris to academic research with impact, with a particular focus on ethical issues currently being debated by society at large.

Welcome to all!