DeGroote Welcomes Six New Faculty Members

Over the past year DeGroote has welcomed six new faculty members as international experts and innovators who bring with them diverse expertise from numerous business and related disciplines.

We are pleased to welcome: Amir Akbari (Finance and Business Economics), Yoontae Jeon (Finance and Business Economics), Addisu Lashitew (Strategic Management), Paul Snowdon (Strategic Management), S. Amy Sommer (Health Policy and Management) and Baniyelme Zoogah (Human Resources and Management). 

“New faculty bring new ideas, energy and networks of relationships into our community,” says Aaron Schat, Associate Dean, Faculty Affairs & Accreditation (Acting). “Their expertise, along with the expertise of our existing faculty and staff, will grow our research enterprise and enable us to strengthen our existing programs and build new programs. Through their teaching, scholarly activity, and service contributions, they will have a profound impact on our community, students, and society at large for many years.”

To grow research and teaching capacity, DeGroote has an ambitious plan to welcome up to 25 new faculty members over the next three years. Schat explains the goal is to enhance DeGroote’s impact on students and society.

Get to know our latest faculty members:

Amir Akbari

Assistant Professor, Finance and Business Economics 

What attracted you to the DeGroote School of Business and McMaster University?  
The research environment. McMaster is one of the leading research schools in the world and is Canada’s most research-intensive university. Specifically, the researchers in my area, Finance and Business Economics, are very active; each year, they publish several high-quality and impactful papers in top-tier finance and economics journals. My area also hosts a large and active Ph.D. program, which is exciting to work with. 

What excites you most about working here?  
McMaster and DeGroote offer a very supportive research environment. I have friendly, collegial, and smart colleagues that I constantly learn from them. Students are also very motivated and eager to learn. This makes my teaching experiment both purposeful and joyful. 

What is your primary area of expertise?  
I do research on empirical asset pricing, mostly on international stock markets. The main research question that I investigate is how financial shocks in one country are propagated to other stock markets across the world. 

Describe your teaching style – how do you engage students?  
I emphasize experiential learning in my teaching and my main goal is to prepare students for the job market. My classes have a lot of hands-on in-class activities using industry data and advanced programs. My exams are usually take-home or open-book and are based on real-life assignments for financial analysts or portfolio managers.  

Tell us one surprising or incredible fact about yourself.  
I bake delicious (Montreal-style) bagels. 

Yoontae Jeon

Assistant Professor, Finance and Business Economics

What attracted you to the DeGroote School of Business and McMaster University? 
I was attracted to the DeGroote School of Business and McMaster University for its excellent research-oriented environment, supportive colleagues, and its interdisciplinary research initiatives.  

What excites you most about working here?  
I am most excited about working with such a highly motivated research environment and active student interactions, from both undergraduate and graduate students. I find the place extremely energetic and it encourages me to be always motivated. 

What is your primary area of expertise?  
My research focuses on understanding the informational content embedded in the financial markets. Specifically, I have conducted research in extracting information embedded in financial derivatives contracts and news articles, and how they can be used to better understand the financial market.  

What motivated you to pursue this field of study?  
As someone with quantitative background, I was first fascinated by the econometric methods developed by prior researchers and how they can be applied to real financial data. As I pursue deeper into the field, I became more amazed to find out how rich the hidden information embedded in the financial data can be. 

Describe your teaching style – how do you engage students?   
I try to emphasize the real connection between course materials and practical matters. I engage with students by trying to motivate them to think how each material they learn can be useful for specific tasks they will be assigned in their future careers.  

Tell us one surprising or incredible fact about yourself. 
I didn’t know anything about the stock market, or even what stock is, until I finished my undergraduate degree. But I have become a finance professor now. 

Addisu Lashitew

Assistant Professor, Strategic Management 

What attracted you to the DeGroote School of Business and McMaster University?  
I was attracted to DeGroote School of Business because of its focus on social entrepreneurship and inclusive business, which are my main areas of expertise.  

What excites you most about working here?  
McMaster is unique for its exceptionally collegial and supportive work environment. We have an incredible support system that extends from our departments all the way to the faculty and university level. I think few universities are fortunate enough to have such an excellent, supportive work culture and leadership.  

What is your primary area of expertise?  
My PhD was in development economics, a field that is concerned with understanding why some countries grow while others remain poor. After my graduation, I joined a business school as a post-doctoral researcher, which gave me an opportunity to study social entrepreneurship, which also aims to shed light on failed and successful development outcomes. But the approach is much more micro-oriented and hands on.  

What motivated you to pursue this field of study?  
I was born and grew up in Ethiopia, a country beset by rampant poverty. When I got the opportunity to pursue my graduate studies in The Netherlands, I was naturally keen to understand the reasons behind the poverty of my country, so I decided to study development economics. 

Describe your teaching style – how do you engage students?  
I have a genuine passion for teaching and always strive to create an engaging classroom atmosphere. One method I use to make my classes lively is applying the lessons to current issues that students find interesting. 

 Tell us one surprising or incredible fact about yourself.  
 I love travelling and have been to all of the inhabited continents. 

Paul Snowdon

Assistant Professor, Strategic Management 

What attracted you to the DeGroote School of Business and McMaster University?  
After a 25-year career as a process engineer, change agent, and management consultant, I chose to come to the DeGroote School of Business because I wanted to be part of a team that transforms the thinking AND doing of tomorrow’s business leaders. I want to build the leaders, that build the businesses, that build Canada’s economy. To do that, it is going to require bold, visionary, and interdisciplinary approaches that connect research and education, with societal impact. I chose to work here at Mac because this is what sits at the heart of McMaster University and the DeGroote School of Business.  

What excites you most about working here?  
The depth and breadth of talent here is incredible, as is the desire to be even bolder with our thinking. I get excited thinking about the vastness of McMaster’s resources, and the impact we can create if we work together. I believe our biggest opportunity as a business school is to enable leaders to adopt a human-centered orientation and an ecosystems-perspective about how organizations will create value in this Fourth Industrial Revolution. If we do this well, the future is limitless, and that to me is VERY exciting. 

What is your primary area of expertise?  
The central theme of my work is understanding how to build capacity in individuals, teams, and organizations to achieve strategic goals. My doctoral thesis examined how individuals pursue goals when the path forward is uncertain, and it was recognized by the European Doctoral Programs Association in Management and Business Administration (EDAMBA) as one of the top ten in Europe in 2020. From a technical perspective, I am a qualitative and mixed-methods researcher who investigates self-efficacy, team-efficacy, self-regulation, team-regulation in different organizational settings. An emerging stream of my research is the study of collaboration, trust, psychological safety, and emotional intelligence in teams that are enabled with artificial intelligence tools. Ever the engineer focused on practical solutions, I am deeply committed to helping leaders integrate these theoretical perspectives into their work practices, and in so doing, develop more adaptive and resilient teams within their organization.   

What motivated you to pursue this field of study?  
My research focus comes from my professional experiences as a change agent and management consultant. I observed that far too many organizations and teams fail to achieve their goals, and I wanted to know why. I reasoned that if I could better understand why some groups achieved their goals and others did not, then my research could help leaders (and organizations) be more successful, create higher performing teams, and increase the engagement of employees. I wondered (and still hope) that the application of my research could improve a person’s quality of life at work. These are the questions that propelled me into a doctorate program, and continue to drive my research today. 

Describe your teaching style – how do you engage students?  
My classroom is what I call a ‘Strategy Dojo’; a place where students come for their strategy work-out.  My Dojo is full of dialogue, debate, and knowledge sharing. Strategy comes to life through a combination of lectures, case studies, and what I like to call ‘Dr. Paul Specials’ …. where I connect lecture content with ideas, theories, and experiences from other disciplines. My students tell me I’m an engaging and dynamic lecturer whose practical experiences make the topics come alive.  And the good news is that no athletic experience is required to join my Dojo, just a willingness to get in the game.

Tell us one surprising or incredible fact about yourself.  
I learned to play the tenor saxophone in my early thirties and am now a huge jazz fan…. and heck, if I can do that, you can certainly master strategy, or at the very least, become a fan like I did. 

S. Amy Sommer

Associate Professor, Health Policy and Management 

What attracted you to the DeGroote School of Business and McMaster University?  
I am delighted to be joining the DeGroote School of Business and McMaster University due to their cross-disciplinary research and teaching with impact. 
   
What excites you most about working here?  
I am looking forward to contributing to DeGroote’s strategic plan that emphasizes healthcare management. McMaster University has a reputation of innovative research and teaching and I am excited to be joining the faculty. 
   
What is your primary area of expertise?  
My research focuses on leadership and teams in healthcare management. During crisis situations and across time, my research investigates how to enhance creativity and resilience that contributes to health processes and outcomes. Given the complexity of the phenomenon, I am exploring and developing new research methods to study leaders and teams, including crowdsourcing science for large-scale data collection and data analytics. 
   
What motivated you to pursue this field of study?  
Growing up in Canada, I saw physician and nurse leaders and teams who are highly skilled, face the challenges of socialized medicine and hospital bed shortage crises. Management principles can help inform healthcare processes and outcomes and my research and teaching strives to enhance this system. 
   
Describe your teaching style – how do you engage students?  
My teaching philosophy aims to engage students to become active participants in the learning process for self-growth. Accordingly, I incorporate multiple methods of pedagogy to generate student participation, and consider their learning styles to foster individual and collective development. 

Baniyelme Zoogah

Associate Professor, Human Resources and Management 

What attracted you to the DeGroote School of Business and McMaster University?  
I was attracted to DeGroote and McMaster University by the research focus of the school and university. Through interactions with some of the faculty at conferences I grew to admire the openness to diverse potentials, collegiality, and supportiveness of the faculty.   

What excites you most about working here?  
I am excited by the opportunity to conduct research that is meaningful, transformative, and enriching to individuals, organizations, and societies that have sometimes being off the radar of scholars.   

What is your primary area of expertise?  
My primary area of expertise is in the Management (Human Resources and Organizational Behavior) and the African context. I investigate the development of employees, by looking at the attributes, behaviors, and capabilities of individuals and groups and how environments and institutions enable these actors to optimize their potential in organizations and societies. 

What motivated you to pursue this field of study?  
I was motivated by the desire to improve the conditions – working and living – of individuals and groups in the workplace and society. So, I focused on the factors that enhance and constrain optimization of their potential.  

Describe your teaching style – how do you engage students?  
My teaching style is based on the dialogic method where I instigate and continually probe, in a concerted effort to explore the underlying beliefs that shape the students views and opinions. It is a method that derives from the scribal schools of ancient Kemet.   

Tell us one surprising or incredible fact about yourself.  
I love sports passionately, particularly soccer, so much so that in high school my peers used to call me “bal kramang” literally meaning “the ball dog” because dogs tend to chase after balls.