17 New Faculty Members Will Help Bocconi Blend Knowledge
As Bocconi reopens after the summer break, it will have 17 new researchers recruited on the international market, adding to the six faculty members who arrived in February.
"The new arrivals are going to strengthen Bocconi departments," says Francesco Billari, current Dean of faculty and the University's future Rector, "not just directly, but also indirectly: a feature shared by many of the new hires is, in fact, the ability to do research on topics that straddle multiple disciplines. Keeping the high disciplinary standards, this year we are acquiring economists who also deal with topics in political science or statistics, computer scientists who do cognitive science, or marketing scholars with a strong background in statistics, just to name a few examples."
Many believe that innovation is most vibrant at the boundary between disciplines, as distinguished Bocconi alumnus Alberto Alesina, proponent of economics in close connection with the social sciences, has also shown. "We are now reaping the benefits of a Bocconi that has been able to push the frontier of knowledge and attract researchers capable of mixing different sciences," Billari concludes.
The Department of Economics welcomes two Full Professors and an Assistant Professor
Coming from Cornell University, Marco Battaglini, after graduating from Bocconi University earned a PhD in Economics from Northwestern University then pursued his academic career in the United States. Before teaching at Cornell as Edward H. Meyer Professor of Economics, Battaglini was at Princeton for 14 years. He is editor of the Games and Economic Behavior publication, and is on the Board of Editors of American Economic Review: Insights. His recent research interests focus on Dynamic models of public decision making; multilateral bargaining in legislatures; information aggregation; economics of networks. His research areas are Economic Theory, Game Theory, Contract Theory, Political Economy, and Laboratory Experiments.
The Department's other new Full Professor, Eleonora Patacchini, is also coming from the prestigious Cornell University. She previously taught at Syracuse University and La Sapienza in Rome. Eleonora Patacchini holds a PhD in Statistics from La Sapienza and a PhD in Economics from Southampton University. Her studies range from big data to applied economics with specific regard to ethnic minorities and gender differences. Her recent research focuses on the empirical analysis of behavioral models of strategic interactions for decision making.
Completing the roster of new additions to the Department of Economics is Sarah Eichmeyer, who will take the position of Assistant Professor. Sarah Eichmeyer had a similar position at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich after earning her PhD in Economics at Stanford. Her academic interests are public and health economics.
The Department of Computing Sciences grows with an Associate Professor and two Assistant Professors
Laura Sanità, the new Associate Professor, graduated in Management Engineering from Rome-Tor Vergata and earned a PhD in Operations Research from the University of Rome-La Sapienza. After some experiences in Switzerland and Canada, she was appointed Associate Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands). She has done research in the areas of combinatorial optimization, network design and game theory.
Debora Nozza, PhD in Computer Science at the University of Milano-Bicocca, has previously held the position of Research Fellow at Bocconi. Her studies on natural language processing have focused on how to detect and counter hate speech and on the algorithm bias in social media that underpins many types of online discrimination. She's now an Assistant Professor.
Alessandro Sanzeni, a physics graduate from Milan State University where he also received his PhD, has spent the past six years as a researcher in the United States. After a stint at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, he continued his research career at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. His research focused on the fields of neurobiology and biomechanics. He joins Bocconi as an Assistant Professor.
Four new faculty join the Department of Marketing.
Jessica Jumee Kim joins Department of Marketing as an Assistant Professor. She is a dedicated marketing researcher and consultant who is passionate about designing creative research solutions to answer important marketing questions. She has several years of industry experience working with various clients deciphering consumer insights. She holds a PhD in Quantitative Marketing at Rady School of Management, where she also gained teaching experiences.
Iris Steenkamp joins the Department of Marketing as an Assistant Professor. She obtained a PhD in Marketing at London Business School. Her research explores the impact of marketing in emerging markets, aiming to provide a new perspective on central marketing concepts by linking these to key social and economic development outcomes (i.e., gender empowerment, resilience, and self-confidence) using rigorous and causal methods as well as novel and objective outcome measures.
Heeyoung Yoon, a PhD graduate in Marketing at the New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business, is a new Assistant Professor in the Department of Marketing at Bocconi University. She has teaching experience both at NYU Stern School of Business and Yonsei Business School. Much of her work studies Judgment and Decision Making, Consumption Experiences, Prediction Bias, Interpersonal Relationships, while her teaching interests include Marketing Management, Marketing Research, Data Driven Marketing, Consumer Behavior, and Managerial Decision Making.
A Boston University PhD in Information Systems, Kai Zhu comes to Bocconi as an Assistant Professor from McGill University, where he had the same role. His research broadly seeks to understand how digital technologies change market, media, politics, and society. Specifically, he is concerned with bias, inequality, and polarization that may exist in many large-scale socio-technical systems (e.g. online platforms). In his research, he combines machine learning, natural language processing, causal inference, and other computational tools to learn about human behavior and system dynamics in the real-world using large-scale structured and unstructured data.
The Department of Finance grows by three faculty
Katrin Goedker, a new Assistant Professor, comes from Maastricht University, School of Business and Economics, where she was a Postdoc. She received her PhD from Hamburg University and was a visiting PhD student at UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business. She is an empiricist working in the field of Behavioral Finance. Much of her work studies investor beliefs and how they affect investor behavior using experiments (lab, online, and field) as well as archival datasets.
Clément Mazet-Sonilhac joins the Department of Finance as an Assistant Professor after being a research economist at Banque de France and associate researcher at the Collège de France Economics of Innovation Lab. He earned his PhD from Sciences-Po, where he also had teaching experience. His fields of interest include finance, international trade and studies on the role of information frictions.
Jakob Blaabjerg Ahm Sørensen, a PhD graduate at the Center for Financial Frictions and Department of Finance at Copenhagen Business School, is a new Assistant Professor in the Department of Finance. During the academic year 2018-2019 he was a visiting PhD at the Behavioral Finance & Financial Stability Project at Harvard Business School, and a visiting Fellow at Harvard University. His research interests include empirical asset pricing, macro-finance and corporate finance.
The Departments of Accounting; Decision Sciences; Management and Technology; Social and Political Sciences hired one new Assistant Professor each.
The new Assistant Professor of the Department of Accounting is Lauren Vollon, formerly at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business where he completed a Master of Business Administration after a Master of Science in Finance at the University of California, San Diego. His research has focused on capital markets regulation and merger and acquisition agreements.
Luca Braghieri will join as an Assistant Professor the Department of Decision Sciences coming from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich where he was Assistant Professor. Braghieri, after a PhD from Stanford in Economics, has done research in applied microeconomics and behavioral economics.
Garrett Levy Brady, a recent PhD graduate in Organizational Behavior at London Business School, joins the Department of Management and Technology. His program of research is related to the domain of organizational behavior, generally, and to leadership, social hierarchy, and interpersonal influence, specifically. He is interested in when and why leaders negatively impact the organizations they direct and the subordinates they manage. To address these questions, he invokes an evolutionary lens of social influence. His research also considers the interdependent nature of social status and power, with particular focus on how possessing power or status manifests in different negotiation techniques and outcomes.
Mislav Radic joins the Department of Social and Political Sciences as an Assistant Professor after being a Research Fellow at UCL School of Management in 2021. He received his PhD from Cass Business School in 2020. Prior to joining UCL, Mislav was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In addition to academic research, Mislav is a consultant for several private and public sector organizations, an active member of the World Economic Forum's Global Shapers community and a contributor to the Chatham House. Mislav's research lies at the intersection between organizational and social change.