From the business implications of artificial intelligence (AI) to exploring the nuisances of social networks, this year’s new faculty bring a wealth of knowledge and inquiry to Goizueta.
Our faculty showcase the breadth of innovation and thought leadership that equips our students for an ever-changing marketplace.
Gareth James, John H. Harland Dean of Goizueta Business School
Goizueta Business School is pleased to welcome the following faculty members for the 2024/25 academic year.
Faculty
Tucker Balch: Professor in the Practice and Research of Finance
Tucker Balch’s work lies at the intersection of AI and finance. He holds a bachelor’s degree and PhD in computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology. In addition, he’s held research and teaching positions at Carnegie Mellon University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was a tenured full professor. A prolific author and inventor, he has published over 115 peer-reviewed research papers and filed 40 patents.
In the financial industry, Balch served as managing director of AI Research for JP Morgan Chase. Since 2019, he helped create and grow the research team, applying machine learning, cryptography, and synthetic data for finance to business problems. Further, he’s a successful startup co-founder of Lucena Research (now Neuravest) in the alternative data for investing space. Always innovating, he is an online education pioneer, developing and teaching massive online open courses (MOOCs) including, “Computational Investing” and “Machine Learning for Trading.” Prior to his research career, Balch served as an F-15 pilot in the U.S. Air Force.
Jake Jo 15BBA: Assistant Professor in the Practice of Organization and Management
A 2015 BBA alum, Jo received his PhD in management from The McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. In 2021, he returned to Goizueta as a postdoctoral fellow in organization and management, where he taught organizational behavior and negotiations.
His research explores the psychological processes behind how people form their informal social networks. Specifically, he works in two areas: one, examining the ways individuals think about who they should connect with and two, how their approaches to forming social connections differ based on their identity groups. His work has been published in top academic outlets including Journal of Applied Psychology.
Brian Jonghwan Lee: Assistant Professor of Finance
Brian Jonghwan Lee completed his PhD in finance at Columbia Business School in 2024. Prior to his PhD, he received his undergraduate degree in economics and statistics from Carnegie Mellon University and subsequently held research positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
His research areas include corporate finance and household finance, delving into topics such as credit score inequality and bankruptcy. An avid soccer fan, Lee grew up in Seoul, Korea, and Athens, Georgia.
Dionne Nickerson: Assistant Professor of Marketing
Dionne Nickerson’s research focuses on the impact of sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on marketing strategy. Her work has been published in Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Channels. In 2024, she was a finalist for the AMA Foundation Robert Lusch Early Career Research Award.
Nickerson was born and raised on Chicago’s South Side. She earned her PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Also, she holds an AB in engineering (Brown University) and an MBA (Providence College). Prior to joining Goizueta, she was a faculty member at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington. A former technology consultant, Nickerson advised clean technology start-ups funded through the EPA’s Small Business Innovation Research program on marketing strategy, and taught English through the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF).
Post Doctoral Fellows
Jared Scruggs: Organization and Management
Jared Scruggs received his PhD (2024) and MS (2022) in management from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His research broadly addresses justice and equity at work and reflects both societal and organizational influences. Specifically, he examines how these elements shape employee attitudes, well-being, and behaviors, using a variety of methodologies, including field and online surveys and experiments, archival datasets, and natural-language processing.
Excerpts of his dissertation on “The Rejection of ‘Work as Worth,’” won the 2023 Academy of Management William H. Newman Award and the OB Division’s Most Innovative Student Paper. In addition, Scruggs has undergraduate degrees in psychology and neuroscience along with Portuguese from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to academia, he worked as an international payroll specialist at CloudPay Solutions.
Maoyu Zhang: Information Systems and Operations Management
Prior to this appointment, Maoyu Zhang was a visiting scholar at Goizueta. She completed her PhD in statistics from the Institute of Statistics and Big Data at Renmin University of China (RUC) in 2024. Her research involves the statistical analysis of networks, graphs, and tensor data, with applications in business, neuroscience, and social science. In addition, she is interested in statistical depth and its applications. Recently, her paper “Learning Brain Connectivity in Social Cognition with Dynamic Network Regression,” was published in the Annals of Applied Statistics. Earlier in her career, Zhang received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, applied mathematics, and economics from Central China Normal University.
Goizueta faculty apply their expertise and knowledge to solving problems that society—and the world—face. Learn more about faculty research at Goizueta.
