Bielinski Family Faculty Scholar Fund

Dr. Hanson’s research is at the intersection of real estate, urban economics, and public finance. He studies a variety of topics in these areas but focuses on Government Policy in Housing Markets, Discrimination in Housing and Mortgage Markets, and Urban Redevelopment. He recently developed a process to use correspondence experiments to study discrimination in real estate markets, examining the treatment of clients with different gender, race, and ethnic backgrounds. Several organizations have funded his research, including the Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Apartment Association, the National Association of Realtors, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Dr. Hanson received a Most Outstanding Paper Award from Public Finance Review for his work on Location-Based Tax Incentives. He has been interviewed and has had his work featured in many popular press outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and Crain’s.

Prof. Chen’s research interests and body of work primarily relate to understanding the valuation implications and the market pricing of accounting information. His studies utilize diverse tools and methodologies developed in empirical accounting/finance research, computer science, and linguistics. Prof. Chen’s works have been presented at numerous universities within the US and abroad, as well as to the Financial Accounting Standards Board. While at UIC, he has published eight studies in highly regarded peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Review of Accounting Studies, Management Science, and the Review of Asset Pricing Studies. The study titled “Disclosure Prominence and the Quality of Non-GAAP Earnings” received the recognition of Wiley Top Cited Article 2021-2022. He has also served as a reviewer for top journals in the field, such as The Accounting Review, Review of Accounting Studies, and Contemporary Accounting Research. He has received recognition for excellence in reviewing rewards from the American Accounting Association Financial Accounting and Reporting Section five times.

Professor Yuan’s research focuses on job stress and employee well-being, workplace relationships, and quantitative research methods. Through his research, he aims to better understand why work can be so stressful and what organizations can do to effectively support their employees. He has published over 20 peer-reviewed articles, many of which appeared in top-ranked management journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, and the Journal of Organizational Behavior. His research has been cited over 1600 times on Google Scholar. His work has been covered in mainstream media outlets, including Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, CBS, and the Wall Street Journal. Professor Yuan currently serves as the editorial board member of Journal of Applied Psychology and Personnel Psychology and is the chair of the history committee of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. In 2023, he received the Lawrence R. James Early Career Award from the Research Methods Division of the Academy of Management.

Dr. Duhachek’s research focuses on two key areas–the interplay between consumer emotions, stress, and coping mechanisms within the context of marketing—and the role of artificial intelligence in consumer decision-making. Professor Duhachek has studied how emotions such as guilt and shame inflect consumer decisions through their use in marketing communications and in contexts where they naturally occur in the consumer decision-making process. In his second focus area, he examines how consumers respond to AI technology.  His research has garnered nearly 7,700 citations and his work has significantly influenced both academic thought and marketing practice. His extensive publication record in top-tier marketing and psychology journals underscores his role as a leading voice in consumer research. A recent analysis published in Journal of Consumer Research named Professor Duhachek one of the field’s top thought leaders over the past 20 years based on the high citation impact of his published work.

Professor Farre-Mensa’s teaching and research interests are in entrepreneurial and corporate finance. Some of his recent work examines how the deregulation of U.S. securities laws in the 1990s has facilitated the process of raising capital privately, thus helping explain the decline in U.S. IPOs and changing the going public vs. staying private trade-off. Joan Farre-Mensa’s research has been published in the leading finance journals, including the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. His papers have received over 3,540 citations according to Google Scholar, and his work has been cited in The Economist, Financial Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Bloomberg, and Forbes, among other outlets. He was awarded the Review of Financial Studies Referee of the Year Award in 2022, and he currently serves as an associate editor at the Journal of Corporate Finance. In addition to regularly refereeing for all leading finance journals, Professor Farre-Mensa has also served as a grant reviewer for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Research Council of Canada.

Professor Tafti’s research examines digital transformation through innovative methods and perspectives, encompassing three areas: economic transformation enabled by digital technology, advancing information systems research through new perspectives on causal modeling, and the ethical, social, and ecological impacts of digital technologies. Dr. Tafti has had 27 papers published in journals, including 14 since earning tenure in 2017. These journals include Information Systems Research, Journal of the AIS, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, and Sloan Management Review. His studies have received more than 2,500 citations; with over 1,500 since 2019. He has a track record of advising PhD students to successful outcomes in publications and faculty job placements and has been a recent co-recipient of a Best Student Paper Award at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (2024). He previously received the CIONET European Research Paper of the Year Award (2013).

Professor Nadarajah’s research focuses on dynamic valuation and decision-making, particularly in investment and operations, guiding organizations through disruptive transitions and toward sustainability. His doctoral work at Carnegie Mellon University, centered on oil and gas conversion assets during the shale boom, which was a major shift towards US energy independence. At UIC, his team studies the clean energy transition using a risk perspective and reinforcement learning, a subfield of AI that deals with optimizing decisions under uncertainty. Dr. Nadarajah’s work has been recognized by prominent professional bodies in business analytics (INFORMS), energy operations and finance (CEMA), and machine learning (NeurIPS). His recognitions include the 2024 INFORMS Harvey J. Greenberg Award for Computing and Operations Research, the 2021 CEMA Best Paper Award, the 2020 INFORMS ENRE Young Researcher Prize and the Best Overall Paper at the 2020 NeurIPS Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning. He is an associate editor for Production and Operations Management Journal (an FT50 journal) and Decision Sciences Journal and serves as ENRE area editor for Information Systems and Operations Journal. Dr. Nadarajah was invited to serve as Decision Intelligence R&D lead at the Discovery Partners Institute (DPI), which is the innovation hub of the University of Illinois System. He also leads the CLEAN-ILLINOIS initiative, which empowers communities to navigate decarbonization through education, data, and technology.