Faculty Mentors

PhD, Stanford; B.S. Wellesley College

Julie Suh earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Wellesley College and her Ph.D. in Business Administration (Accounting) from Stanford University. Her research interests include voluntary disclosure, CEO compensation, earnings management, and corporate governance.  She previously taught financial accounting to undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and most recently, at Loyola Marymount University. While at Berkeley, she was honored with the Outstanding New Instructor Award as well as the student-nominated Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching.  Prior to academia, Suh spent time in the corporate sector as an economic consultant for Cornerstone Research in San Francisco and as an investment banking analyst for Goldman Sachs in New York City. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Marcus, and their two dogs, and enjoys surfing, obstacle course racing, and flying on the trapeze in her free time.

Ph.D., Stanford; B.S., University of Michigan

Smrity Randhawa is an Accounting scholar whose area of expertise spans financial accounting, managerial accounting, valuation, disclosure and corporate governance. Smrity holds a PhD in Business from the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. In her research, she has studied the effect of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on small public companies. At Marshall School of Business she has taught classes ranging from Introductory Accounting for undergraduate students to Financial Statement Analysis for graduate students. In addition to her faculty duties, she also provides consulting services related to: bankruptcy analysis; fair value accounting measurements and valuations; and provides opinions on the analysis of other experts.

MAcc, BS, DePaul University

Rose Layton is an expert in auditing and assurance and financial accounting, particularly in the areas of auditor liability and financial statement fraud. She is a Searle Fellow and a recipient of the Margaret Keldie Award from the American Society of Woman Accountants.

PhD, Utah State University; MS, BS, Vilnius University

Robertas Gabrys has research interest in functional data analysis and its applications in environmental sciences, financial econometrics, and space physics; statistical computing, and actuarial mathematics. His work has been published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Austrian Journal of Statistics.

Feng Chen is an operations management scholar. Her research interests include process analysis, supply chain management and supply chain analytics, and experimental study of behavioral impact on operations decision making. She teaches courses of operations management and data analysis for decision making. Feng received her Ph.D. in business administration from University of Southern California.

Phil Rogers received a B.S. in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and both an M.S. and Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of California at Berkeley, with minors in Statistics and Mathematical Economics. During a 33-year career at Exxon Corporation, Phil developed many sophisticated mathematical models that were used to optimize a wide variety of the Corporation's business operations. He then joined the University of Houston, where he taught courses in statistics, business modeling and decision making and was awarded a university-wide teaching excellence award. Following a year-and-a-half stay at Arizona State University, where he taught business modeling and optimization, Phil joined the Marshall School of Business, where he coordinates the undergraduate core statistics course and teaches in the MBA program.

DBA, MBA, Indiana University; BA, BS, Bemidji State University

Gary Frazier is an expert on structuring and managing channels of distribution and has published extensively in leading marketing journals. He currently serves as editor of Journal of Marketing. He has won several awards for his teaching including Marshall's Golden Apple Award in 2008. Professor Frazier has consulted and taught for a number of major corporations including Coca-Cola, General Electric, Honeywell, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Weyerhaeuser and is active in expert witnessing. He served as an advisor to the Justice Department in its examination of Microsoft. Before joining USC in 1984, Professor Frazier served on the faculty at the University of Illinois.

Rodney Ramcharan served as the first chief of the Systemic Financial Institutions and Markets Section at the Board Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He also worked for the International Monetary Fund from 2000-2010, primarily on emerging markets such as South Africa and in developing economies. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Dutch National Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and a consultant to the Swedish Riksbank. His research has been published in the leading finance and economics journals, such as the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Financial Economics.

PhD, University of Southern California; MBA, BA, California Polytechnic State University

Lars Perner's research interests focus in non-profit marketing, sponsored fundraising, consumer behavior, consumer price response, branding, and bargain hunting. His work has been published in the Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Marketing Education, Journal of Consumer Affairs, and Journal of Consumer Psychology. He currently serves as a faculty coordinator for the Department of Marketing's undergraduate introductory marketing course sections, which serve approximately 1,600 students every academic year.

PhD, University of Southern California; BA, Koc University

Rahsan Akbulut research interests include macroeconomics, labor economics, and household and family economics. Her research was published in Macroeconomic Dynamics. Prior to re-joining USC, she was a visiting Assistant Professor at Pomona College for 3 years. She taught Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, and Applied Regression analysis. Before her academic career began, Professor Akbulut worked as a financial controller at Daimler AG. in Istanbul, Turkey.

MBA, University of Southern California; BA, UCLA

Scott Abrams specializes in corporate finance, portfolio management, financial analysis and valuation, and microeconomics. He teaches these subjects in both the graduate and undergraduate programs at USC Marshall. In addition, Professor Abrams is the co-instructor for the MBA and Undergraduate Student Investment Fund classes. He is the 2016 Golden Apple Teaching Award Winner for the Full-Time MBA Core Program. Professor Abrams received his MBA from USC Marshall and is an alumnus of the SIF Program (2004). Prior to joining the faculty at USC Marshall, he worked in corporate finance at Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. In addition, he is an alumnus of Deloitte and is a licensed CPA.

Ph.D., MBA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Sena Durguner research interests are in the area of Banking and Financial Institutions, Corporate Finance, Small Business Finance, and Financial Economics. Before joining the Marshall School of Business, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Boston and she was also a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in Washington DC. Professor Durguner presented several of her academic papers at governmental organizations such as Federal Reserve Board, Office of the Comptroller of Currency, FDIC, Bank of Canada, and also in national finance conferences. Professor Durguner also taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she was recognized numerous times for her teaching. Her teaching portfolio includes microeconomics, economics statistics, and corporate finance courses. Before her academic background, Professor Durguner worked several years as an analyst in the financial sector.

PhD, University of Illinois; MILR, Cornell University, BA, Bryn Mawr College

Professor Pasztor’s research focuses on digital and mass communication, (media history, media economics, and the media industry, specifically television programming); gender studies (organizational representations, discourse, workplace and pay equity), and popular culture. Her pedagogical expertise in academia includes strategic professional communication, business case analysis, the media industry/history and fandom, and gender communication. She is the author of several book chapters on the media industry, social media/technology and audience engagement. Prior to academia, Dr. Pasztor was a Senior Strategic Management Consultant at Pricewaterhouse LLP and IBM, implementing global organizational, communication and training strategy for Fortune 500 clients.

PhD, University of Texas at Austin; MA, CSU-Los Angeles; BS, Portland State University

Naomi Warren specializes in communication issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, with a particular emphasis on race, gender, social class, media representations, politics, and policy. Her teaching, research, and consulting are informed by her professional experience as an accountant in the transportation, manufacturing, health care, service, retail, entertainment, and legal sectors and her doctoral research in communication studies, rhetoric, race, and the politics of representation. She was honored with a Golden Apple Teaching Award in 2005 and 2010. Service commitments include advising Marshall’s international case competition teams and serving on the University Diversity Committee.

Dr. Guo’s research focuses on organizational and intercultural communication in business. She is particularly interested and specialized in identity development and strategic negotiation in various international organizational contexts. Her research has appeared on top-tier journals that examined topics such as organizational culture, conflict management, emotion management, communication technology use in business (e.g., social media, mobile), and leadership communication. Professor’s pedagogical expertise in academia includes organizational communication, communication strategies in business, leadership communication, business and professional communication, communication in non-western culture, and persuasion. Prior to academia, Dr. Guo held program and event coordinator positions in Chinese and U.S. multinational companies, specializing intercultural business communication.

PhD, UCLA; MDance, CSU-Long Beach; BA, UC-Berkeley

Trudi Ferguson has consulted widely with large and small organizations in many areas of organizational development including strategic planning, team building, executive coaching, diversity, and woman's issues. She serves on the Board of L.A. Best and Ready Set Read.

PhD, Yale University; MBA, University of California, Los Angeles; BA, Stanford University

Dennis Schorr is an expert on strategic flexibility, marketing resources and capabilities, and competitive advantage. His research has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He has consulted for a variety of organizations in Marketing Strategy, Marketing Research and Strategy, and Total Quality Management and Market Responsiveness.

MBA, University of Southern California; BA, Smith College

Jody Tolan specializes in leadership and organizational development. She has created programs to build leadership skills among emerging managers, middle managers, and senior executive teams to meet strategic and organizational goals. She has also led workshops on leading teams, management communications and strategy development. She has designed and facilitated programs in Marshall’s Office of Executive Education and consulted with Wescom Credit Union, Honda Financial Services, Allergan, BDO Seidman and Thailand Government Savings Bank. Professor Tolan began her career on Capitol Hill followed by positions in several boutique consulting firms in New York City.