Ph.D. Students

Rashmi is a first year PhD student in the statistics group at USC Marshall School of Business. He is broadly interested in statistical methods and their application in social science and business. Prior to joining USC, he received his bachelor’s and master’s degree in statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

Katherine Simeon Bruere is a Ph.D. student in the Leventhal School of Accounting. She is interested in empirical financial and audit research, specifically M&A, goodwill and intangible assets, the PCAOB, and going-concern assessments. Prior to starting the Ph.D. program, Katherine worked at Ernst & Young as an auditor in Dallas’ Financial Services division, as well as an accountant at Merit Energy. Katherine earned a BA and an MA in Accounting at Baylor University (2014) and is a licensed CPA in the state of Texas.

Gizem Ceylan is a Ph.D. student in Marketing specializing in consumer behavior in technology-mediated environments, visual word-of-mouth, and psychology of social media. In one line of research, she explores how people express their experiences at the interplay of visual and textual information. She specifically examines whether photos indeed are worth a thousand words. On a separate line of research, she studies how people’s motivational processes (such as self presentational goals) may impact the spread of misinformation on online networks. She uses variety of methods (meta-analysis, text analysis using both dictionary and computational methods) to study these topics.