SOUTH BEND, September 17 — The Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame has added nine new scholars to its faculty for the fall, the College said in an announcement published September 16. The hires span fiscal policy, real estate and asset pricing, business ethics, and human-centered artificial intelligence for underserved populations.
The bottom line: Mendoza is stocking its research bench across finance, analytics and ethics at once, and framing the cohort as an extension of its tradition of research that makes an impact far beyond the classroom. Each fall, the College said, it welcomes a new cohort of scholars whose work shapes how it teaches and thinks about today’s business challenges.
The announcement, written by Andrew Clark, names five of the incoming faculty. The College lists nine in total.
Finance: politics, policy and intangible capital
Will Cassidy joins as assistant professor of finance. His research examines how politics and government policy affect asset prices, with a particular interest in how U.S. fiscal policy is determined endogenously and how the actions of the U.S. Treasury jointly affect equity and bond markets. Cassidy said economic and policy news during his early adulthood was dominated by the 2008 financial crisis and the government actions taken in response, and that economics and finance classes gave him a framework for thinking about those questions while raising new ones.
He comes to Notre Dame from Washington University in St. Louis and earned his master’s and Ph.D. in finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Bianca He also joins as assistant professor of finance, focusing on corporate finance with an emphasis on intangible capital and its role in shaping firm behavior and financial outcomes.
Her work looks at how assets such as technology, brands and customer relationships influence firms’ financing decisions, investment and the broader economy. She earned an MBA and a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Analytics and operations
Long He joins as associate professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations, combining data-driven optimization and machine learning and artificial intelligence to address practical problems in smart city operations, sustainable energy systems and supply chain management. His work is driven by business models such as shared mobility and technologies including electric and autonomous vehicles.
He said he has always been curious about how emerging technologies can make daily life easier while more sustainable, and that as data science and AI have taken off it became natural to explore data-driven solutions that make smart systems more efficient, sustainable and beneficial for everyone. He joins from the George Washington University School of Business and earned his Ph.D. in operations from the University of California, Berkeley.
Jarek Nabrzyski joins as associate vice president for research and research professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations. His focus is human-centered artificial intelligence for people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities, those living with dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and autism, and their caregivers. He said he builds AI-powered assistive communication systems — combining edge AI devices with large language models — that help nonverbal and nonsymbolic individuals express their needs and help caregivers and families understand them.
Nabrzyski has spent most of his career building large-scale computing infrastructure, including the past 17 years at Notre Dame, where he founded and directed the Center for Research Computing.
Ethics and the commercial society
Rosemarie Monge joins as associate teaching professor of Business Ethics and Society. Trained as a normative business ethicist, she is interested in foundational questions of managerial moral responsibility and corporate social responsibility. She said she has recently been reading early modern thinkers on the merits and demerits of the commercial society and thinking about how those should color debates on corporate social responsibility — the idea that managers have an ethical obligation to go beyond compliance and beyond the pursuit of the firm’s self-interest in the market.
Monge joins from the University of St. Thomas and received her Ph.D. in legal studies and business ethics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. What to watch next: the College has named five of the nine scholars in its fall cohort.
The remaining four have not been identified in the announcement.
