UVA Darden Welcomes Six New Professors

The University of Virginia Darden School of Business welcomed six new professors to its top-ranked faculty ahead of the 2017-18 academic year.

The new professors will solidify and enhance Darden’s capabilities in a number of areas, including Marketing, Quantitative Analysis, Technology and Operations Management, and Finance.

• Tami Kim has joined the Marketing area as an assistant professor from Harvard Business School, where she recently finished her DBA. Kim was an American Marketing Association-Sheth Doctoral Consortium Fellow in 2016 and has taught courses on consumer behavior in the Harvard Extension School. Her research interests include implicit contracts, empowerment, transparency, reciprocity, judgement and decision-making.
• Dana Popescu has joined the Quantitative Analysis area as an associate professor. Popescu joins Darden from INSEAD, where she has been an assistant professor of technology and operations management since 2009, teaching in both the MBA program and executive education courses. Popescu’s research interests include pricing and revenue management, supply chain management and the interface between finance and operations. She holds a Ph.D. and master’s degree in operations management from New York University.
• Doug Thomas has joined the Technology and Operations Management area as professor. Thomas has previously taught one-week supply chain management at Darden, and comes to the School on a full-time basis from Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, where he was a professor. Thomas has published extensively in the area of supply chain management and recently coauthored the fourth edition of Inventory and Production Management in Supply Chains. Thomas, who has also held visiting professorship positions at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and INSEAD, has taught in executive programs around the world and is a sought-after consultant for private companies.
• Davide Tomio has joined Finance area as an assistant professor. Tomio recently completed his Ph.D. in finance at the Copenhagen Business School where he was a teaching assistant for the undergraduate corporate finance course. Tomio’s research interests include empirical asset pricing, market microstructure, limits to arbitrage, fixed income, derivative markets and sovereign credit risk.
• Ting Xu has joined the Finance area as an assistant professor. Xu, who recently completed his Ph.D. in finance at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, has researched extensively in corporate and entrepreneurial finance. Xu has taught corporate finance to undergraduates and been a teaching assistant for graduate courses in empirical corporate finance, asset pricing, investment theory and venture capital and angel finance.
• Ozlem Yildiz has joined the Technology and Operations management area as assistant professor. Yildiz recently finished her Ph.D. at the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester, where her dissertation was titled, “Design Reimbursement Schemes and Process Improvement in Service Systems: Applications in Healthcare.” She is expected to collaborate with faculty at the UVA Health System. Her research interests include economics of service systems, healthcare operations management, economic incentives and regulation, and policy design. She has taught at the London Business School in the full-time and executive MBA program.