Manning School Well-Represented at Annual Faculty Research Symposium
03/16/2016
Two faculty members from the Manning School of Business were recognized for their outstanding contributions at the 2016 Faculty Research and Creative Work Symposium on March 3 at the UMass Lowell Inn and Conference Center.
Prof. Asil Oztekin of the Operations and Information Systems Department and Prof. Khondkar Karim, chair of the Accounting Department, were each presented with an award certification from Vice Provost for Research Julie Chen during the event’s awards reception.
The annual symposium, sponsored by Chen’s office, showcases and recognizes achievements by university faculty in research, scholarship and creative work. Through 90-second presentations and poster sessions, more than 100 faculty members from all six schools and colleges highlighted aspects of their work from 2015 that supports the theme of “impacting society through research and creative work.”
“I love this event; I never miss it,” says Oztekin, who presented a poster entitled “A Decision Analytic Approach to Predicting Quality of Life for Lung Allocation Processes: A Hybrid Genetic Algorithms-based Modeling.”
“There are millions of people waiting on a list to receive one single organ, and at a given time you only have one single organ that is available for donation and in turn transplantation. Who is that lucky person to receive the organ?” Oztekin says. “We are trying to model the lung transplantation patient’s ‘quality of life’ after they receive the lung. We want to determine the most important critical features that will help make the decision.”
By looking at more than 500 variables derived from three different data analytic models, Oztekin’s work helps to determine “how long the recipient will survive, what is the survivor’s quality of life, and which lucky person should receive the organ.”
Oztekin adds that the symposium is a great way to not only learn about colleagues’ research work, but to also build collaborations with faculty from other disciplines.
“Over the last five years here, I was approached by several faculty members from computer science, electrical engineering, computer engineering, even chemical engineering, to collaborate with. We have completed several projects together,” Oztekin says.
Karim, meanwhile, thanked the symposium organizers for recognizing those who are actively engaged in scholarship in their respective fields.
“It is a distinct pleasure and honor to receive this award,” says Karim, who adds that as a doctoral-granting school, MSB faculty should keep several things in mind while doing research. “Our students should be able to learn the necessary research skills from us and be able to process and synthesize primary sources of our scholarship. … And our research evidence should have practical implications for practitioners, regulators and standard-setters.”
Two other Manning School faculty members presented posters: Management Asst. Prof. Elana Feldman on “Fast times at InnoTech: Tension between time and progress triggers in creative work” and OIS Assoc. Prof. Harry Zhu on “Does Data Standardization Make Human-Readable Data Harder to Read? Evidence from the XBRL Mandate.”
Three faculty members, meanwhile, made 90-second presentations: Feldman, Management Asst. Prof. Elizabeth Altman (Platform and Ecosystem Transitions: Strategic and Organizational Implications) and Accounting Asst. Prof. Jingrong Lin (Corporate Governance Research in Emerging Markets).
“I think it’s actually harder to put together a 90-second presentation than an hourlong presentation,” Altman says. “It forces you to figure out exactly what you’re doing, what’s the essence of it, and what you want people to know.”
Feldman agrees.
“It’s always a good exercise to say something briefly to someone who doesn’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “And we don’t have many opportunities to see what people across the university are doing, so the 90-second talks give you a sense of the breadth and variety of work that the university is doing.”