FBE DOCTORAL ALUMNI PROFILES 2020

  • Ai Ming Chow, Department of Management and Marketing

    2020

    Thesis Title: Reimagining the Indigenous Art Market: Site of Decolonisation and Reassertion of Indigenous Cultures

    Ai Ming Chow’s PhD research focused on Indigenous art markets in Australia. For her thesis, she conducted interviews with commercial art intermediaries, undertook fieldwork at gallery openings and collected archival data on the Indigenous art world. Her research skills include qualitative research design, advanced data analysis and action-oriented research. Ai Ming’s strong commitment to teamwork is demonstrated in her work with researchers from across the globe, including Australia, the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Europe. She is a firm believer that good working relationships can be fostered by developing each team member’s unique capacity to learn, grow and “create value” in their local communities and the broader society. Her research collaborations include publications and conference presentations. Ai Ming has taught extensively in Marketing and Management disciplines at both the University of Melbourne and the Ducere Business School, University of Canberra.

  • Silvia Griselda, Department of Economics

    2020

    Thesis Title: Thesis on Economics of Education and Gender

    A doctoral candidate in the Department of Economics, Silvia’s principal research interest is on the intersection of education, labour and human capital development. She is particularly interested in the determinants of human capital formation, and which aspect of formal education and culture shape gender difference in educational and labour choices. Her thesis examines female underperformance in international assessments, in particular in Mathematics, and the policies that could help reduce this gender gap. In addition, Silvia’s dissertation research focuses on female enrolment in STEM degrees and majors, investigating the role of female comparative advantage in Humanities disciplines to explain the lower enrolment in STEM disciplines. Silvia moved to Melbourne 5 years ago from Italy to undertake her doctoral studies at Melbourne and she has enjoyed the journey immensely. Notably, Silvia has won several significant awards for her work with Sofoklis Goulas (Stanford) and Rigissa Megalokonomou (University of Queensland). Their paper, “Comparative Advantage and Gender Gap in STEM,” received the 2020 Best Paper Award on Gender Economics (sponsored by UniCredit Foundation), the Mardi Dungey Prize for the Best Paper (ANU, November 2019) and the Best Paper Award at the 2020  Australian Gender Economics Workshop at QUT. Their research has also been picked up by The Conversation via a June 2020 article by Griselda and Megalokonomou, “Girls score the same in maths and science as boys, but higher in arts – this may be why they are less likely to pick STEM careers,” which has been shared on social media 2.8k times.

    Website: https://www.silviagriselda.com/
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/SilviaG27358156

  • Andre Gulyas, Department of Management and Marketing

    Thesis Title: A construal-level approach to understanding individual-level contributions to distributed teamwork, 2019

    A recent PhD graduate with professional work experience in research statistics, data analysis and psychometrics, Andre came to the Department of Management and Marketing to do a PhD armed with a Masters in Industrial and Organisational Psychology. His thesis research sought to  better understand the nature of virtual teams (or 'distributed teams') and virtual work, which he undertook to do by examining team members' perceptions of each other, their place in the team, and how they could use various communication technologies more effectively. As a consultant and analyst, Andre has been expanding his knowledge and capability in the virtual work field. He is currently employed as a research statistician with a biotechnology start-up company, Creative Thinking Institute, which uses MedTech to create products for medical and allied health professionals that are designed to reinvent employee assistance programs and improve human performance.

  • Farzana Hossain, Department of Economics

    Thesis Title: Essays on the impacts of climate change on income-generating activities in developing countries, 2020

    Farzana Hossain recently completed her PhD in which she combined high-resolution spatial data with administrative and survey data and employed econometric modelling to examine the economic impact of climate change in India. She showed that floods lower manufacturing productivity by reallocating resources from the formal sector to the low-productivity, informal sector. Farzana holds a Master of Social Science and a Bachelor of Social Science (Honours) from the University of Dhaka (Bangladesh), where she also worked as a researcher and as a lecturer prior to her arrival in Melbourne. Farzana’s research interests are in the fields of environmental economics, health economics and development economics. As an applied economist, Farzana has considerable expertise in combining big data with mathematical and statistical models to solve economic and social problems. She is currently working on several research projects with academics from the University of Melbourne and Monash University.

  • Xianglong “Locky” Liu, Department of Economics

    Thesis Title: Essays on financial stability, 2020

    Xianglong (Locky) Liu recently completed his PhD in Economics in the area of Applied Macro-finance. He applied advanced data analytic techniques to investigate systemic risk stemmed from interactions among different sectors of the financial market, then assessed policy effectiveness. As part of his research, he also constructed predictive early warning models using supervised Machine Learning algorithms to guide policy activation. During his doctoral studies, Locky developed expertise in an extensive range of transferable skills including analytical modelling, critical thinking and programming. An extremely personable guy, Locky confidently and easily builds strong work relationships and social networks wherever he goes. His success at social networking is aided and abetted by a particular hobby, cocktail-making. He is also adept at communicating with a range of different audiences. Prior to his PhD, Locky held internships at the Commonwealth Bank, the ANZ Bank and the Bank of China, and he also holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) degree from Melbourne in Economics. He is interested in pursuing a career in policy or data analysis where he can utilise his strong economics and analytical background, especially in the financial service industry or at policy institutions. Locky welcomes all opportunities to apply his knowledge and skills to solve real-world problems.

  • Phuong Lan Nguyen, Department of Finance

    Thesis Title: CEO compensation and the agency conflict of debt, 2020

    Phuong Nguyen is in her final year of PhD candidature. Her PhD dissertation examines how U.S. public companies use CEO compensation to resolve the agency conflicts between different stakeholders. For this dissertation, she has developed a simple algorithm to collect the data on CEO compensation of all U.S. public companies. Phuong’s research interests lie in the field of empirical corporate finance, with a focus on the agency problems between different parties in a company. In line with this research interest, her dissertation contains three papers, which study the use of CEO incentive contracts in resolving the shareholder-debtholder conflict. Her job market paper, “New active blockholders and the adjustment of inside debt-equity ratio”, investigates whether active blockholders change CEO pay to increase both shareholder and debtholder value, or only to increase shareholder value. Before pursuing doctoral studies in Australia, Phuong obtained a MSc. in Financial Economics from BI Norwegian Business School and a Bachelor degree in Banking & Finance from the Foreign Trade University (Vietnam). She aims to apply her knowledge and programming skills in exploring new scrapable databases that can help bridge the gap between industry practices and academic research, especially in areas related to capital raising decisions and corporate governance. Besides web scraping, Phuong is also proficient at processing data in multiple statistics programs such as Matlab, R, Python, SAS,  and Stata.

  • Ozlem “Ozzie” Ozkok, Department of Management and Marketing

    Thesis Title: Frontline Employee Networks for Service Innovation, 2020

    Ozzie recently completed her PhD in Marketing in which she investigated service employees’ social networks and their impact on innovation. With more than 10 years’ professional experience in a wide range of marketing fields including customer service, supply chain and IT systems planning, e-commerce website design and development, forecasting for demand and supply in service organisations and digital marketing, Ozzie’s research interests are clustered around customer service employees and customer-facing technologies, big data and the impact of these technologies on organisation marketing and innovation outcomes. Ozzie graduated in the top 5 in a class of 200 from the Turkish Naval Academy with a Bachelor of Electronics Engineering and went on to earn a Master of Science in Information Technology Management and a Master of Science in Computer Science with distinction  from the United States Naval Postgraduate School, followed by an MBA, where as she puts it, she fell in love with marketing and decided to pursue a PhD in the discipline.

  • Sabrina Tabassum, Department of Economics

    2020

    Thesis Title: Essays on Labour Market Performance of Immigrants in Australia

    Sabrina’s PhD research addresses the economic and labour market issues faced by immigrants in Australia and considers how these issues can be resolved by policy makers. Now in her final year of the PhD, Sabrina previously completed a Master of Commerce (Economics) from the University of Melbourne and also holds a Master of International Economics and Finance from the University of Queensland. She earned her Bachelor of Business Administration from the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), University of Dhaka, the top-ranked business school in Bangladesh. Sabrina has demonstrated expertise in data analysis using statistical and econometric tools, having held a variety  of roles prior to her doctoral studies. She has worked as a Financial Analyst in a multinational company, as well as a research associate at the University of Queensland, the University of Melbourne and the International Labour Organization (ILO). Sabrina excels as a team-player and counts this along with her interpersonal skills, strong work ethic, integrity, and high attention to detail among her strengths. After completion of her PhD, she aims to pursue a research or consulting career in the Social Science, Business or Economics fields.