New Faces: Fostering a fresh perspective
Among the newly appointed faculty members here at the Odette School of Business are Xiaolei Guo, Eksa Kilfoyle, and Kent Walker.
Xiaolei Guo will be focusing on the Cross-Border Transportation Centre at the Odette School of Business as he joins the Management Science area.
Bringing a wealth of talent and expertise Dr. Guo’s primary research interests are in the areas of transportation systems analysis and optimization, and transportation economics and policy. Traffic congestion is one of the major problems that challenge the sustainable development of our society, both economically and environmentally. His research so far has focused on transportation modeling and analysis which lead to tools and policies that are promising to beat traffic congestion and promote sustainable development.
He is professionally affiliated with the Transportation Research Board, a member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences, and was a session chair in 2009 for the International Transport Economics Conference.
Prior to joining the Odette faculty, he was a post-doctoral associate in the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota. He received his B.S. in Hydraulic Engineering in June 2004 from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and his Ph.D. in civil engineering in July 2008 from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Eksa Kilfoyle, joining the Accounting area, was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and moved to Canada at the age of 14.
She has spent the last few years successfully wrapping up her PhD, specializing in international accounting and control at the Schulich School of Business at York University. Her thesis analyzed the implementation of the international management accounting and control practices in local contexts. The purpose of her thesis is to contribute to our understanding of how the principle of “thinking globally and acting locally” manifests itself in the adoption of accounting practices around the world.
Dr. Kilfoyle is a Chartered Accountant. After working for several years as a public accountant and bankruptcy and restructuring consultant, she transitioned to an academic career to pursue her passion for teaching and research.
She will be teaching an introductory managerial accounting course and a fourth-year course in management accounting and control systems taught by the case method of instruction. The aim of this course is to capture the complex and multidimensional nature of management accounting and control issues and to develop students’ problem identification, problem solving and decision making skills. This course is particularly useful for students aspiring to be managers, controllers, management consultants, compensation consultants, financial specialists and human resource specialists.
Kilfoyle is also actively involved in the education of Chartered Accountants in Ontario through her activities as a seminar leader at the School of Accountancy of the Institute of Chartered Accountants Of Ontario.
Her research interests include:
• The interaction of local and global practices, expanding our knowledge of how local idiosyncrasies shape the implementation of global accounting practices
• Understanding the role of informal management accounting and control practices in organizations
• Cross-cultural variations in the interaction of academics and professional bodies in the education of professional accountants
• The role of academic institutions in constructing the “ethical professional accountant”
Kent Walker, whose doctoral work was completed at the I.H. Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba, joined the Odette School of Business strategy area in September 2010, building on his post-doctoral research interests in organizations and the natural environment, corporate social responsibility, business strategy and competitive advantage.
His dissertation focused on corporate environmental performance (CEP), and in particular, why companies show varying degrees of CEP and how this relates to financial performance. As a result, Dr. Walker obtained some very interesting outcomes -- including that the more resources and uncertainty in the external business environment, the worse the CEP (or the greater the toxic air emissions specifically), as well as the finding that strong CEP is not related to strong financial performance, but poor CEP has significant negative financial consequences. Other findings included that companies that able to greenwash, portraying themselves as being green when in fact they have a relatively high level of toxic air emissions, were able to avoid the negative financial consequences of poor CEP.
His other research interests include examining the impact of teaching students an alternative approach to management, focused not solely short-term financial well-being but also on environmental, social, physical, spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional well-being.
Walker is currently the course co-ordinator for Introduction to Business offered at the Odette School of Business where the average course enrolment is 800 first-year students. He is a professional member in good standing with the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada and the Academy of Management.
Meet these and the other Odette faculty members in our on-line directory.
