Our Team

Laurence Ashworth is a researcher and teacher at the Smith School of Business. He completed his Ph.D. in 2004 at the University of British Columbia prior to coming to Queen’s.

His research is quite varied, but he is generally interested in social and emotional influences on consumers’ decision-making. His work has been published in a variety of top journals such as, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing, and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. He also comments regularly and has had his work cited in the New York Times, the National Post, the Globe and Mail, Macleans, Psychology Today, etc. He has been interviewed on Canada AM, Global TV, and other television and radio stations.

Laurence teaches courses on Principles of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour to students in the undergraduate, M.Sc., Ph.D., and M.B.A. programs at the Smith School of Business. A central theme of Laurence’s teaching is to integrate broad strategic approaches to marketing with more specific, evidence-based ideas that help predict how and why consumers will react to the decisions that marketers make. The goal is to provide students with a broad framework that they can take to the marketplace that will help them make good marketing decisions.

Dr. Brower's research interest include marketing strategy, corporate reputation and brand management, corporate social responsibility and sustainability, brand loyalty and loyalty programs, top management team dynamics, and innovation and design thinking.

His research has primarily examined: 1) the factors that drive corporate social performance (CSP) by firms, 2) whether or not firm CSP impacts firm performance, and 3) how organizations can stimulate pro-social behaviour and ethical consumption practices.

Tina Dacin is the Stephen J.R. Smith Chair of Strategy and Organizational Behavior at Smith School of Business, Queen's University, Canada and also the Director of the Community Impact Research Program. She is the former Director of the Smith School of Business Centre for Social Impact as well as a former member of the University Senate at Queen's University and Former Chair of the Principal's Innovation Fund Committee.

Professor Dacin's research interests include cultural heritage and traditions, social innovation/entrepreneurship, and strategic alliances.  Her work has been published in leading management journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management, Journal of World Business, Organization Science, and the Strategic Management Journal. She has also served as Senior/Consulting Editor for Organization Science, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management Inquiry. She has previously served for multiple terms on the Editorial Review Boards of the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, the Journal of International Business Studies, Strategic Organization and Strategic Management Journal. 

Professor Dacin teaches courses in leadership, change, and strategy. Professor Dacin advises and speaks to major corporations in the airline, biotechnology, defense, energy, financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications sectors as well as a number of public sector and non-profit organizations.  She currently sits on the boards of the Kingston Community Foundation and GRLI, a global advocacy organization for promoting responsible leadership in business schools and organizations. Professor Dacin has received several awards and recognition for research and teaching.  Most recently, she was inducted as a Visiting Fellow into Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge, UK and is a Visiting Fellow of the Judge Business School. She has also been a Visiting Professor for several years at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India.

Elaheh Fata is an Assistant Professor of Management Analytics at Smith School of Business in Kingston, Canada. Elaheh holds a Ph.D. from MIT, an MASc from University of Waterloo and a BSc from Sharif University of Technology.

Dr. Ceren Kolsarici joined Smith School of Business as an Assistant Professor of Marketing in Fall 2009.

Before joining Queen's University as a faculty member, Dr. Kolsarici earned her Ph.D. in Marketing (2009) from McGill University. In 2008, she was distinguished as the American Marketing Association-Sheth Consortium Fellow. She was also nominated for national (SSHRC) and provincial (ADESAQ) doctoral dissertation awards by McGill University at the faculty level.

Dr. Kolsarici specializes in advertising, diffusion of new products, and pharmaceutical marketing. Her current research encompasses several critical areas including design and evaluation of integrated marketing communications campaigns, media selection and scheduling, marketing budgeting, and development of advertising creative strategies. In her research, she develops new models and methods to improve managerial decisions and marketing applications in practice, by helping managers better understand how marketing affects performance.

Ceren Kolsarici currently teaches marketing management, and integrated marketing communications at Smith. Her research has been published in prestigious journals such as Journal of Marketing Research, and International Journal of Research in Marketing. She has presented her research at UC Davis, Northwestern University, Erasmus University, Tilburg University, as well as national and international conferences in Australia, Belgium, US, the Netherlands, Germany and Turkey.

Dr. Kolsarici also holds a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering (2002) from Middle East Technical University, and an MBA (2004) from Bilkent University.

Yanzhe (Murray) Lei is an Assistant Professor of Management Analytics at Smith School of Business in Kingston, Canada. Murray holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration from University of Michigan, and a B.Eng in Automation from Tsinghua University, China. Murray’s research lies at the intersection between business analytics and operations management, with a particular focuses on the development and analysis of real-time prescriptive analytics solutions that are easily implementable in a dynamic business environment.

Tanya Levin is an Associate Professor of Management Science. Her current research focuses on algorithmic learning methods in revenue management and dynamic pricing based on earlier work with online learning algorithms for stock market portfolio rebalancing. Tanya has authored or co-authored papers in Operations Research and Operations Research Letters, presented numerous national and international conference papers, and published a book chapter on "Online methods for portfolio selection".

Tanya received her PhD in Management from Rutgers University, NJ, USA in 2004. She also holds an MBA from Rutgers University.

Guang Li is an assistant professor of Management Science in Smith School of Business at Queen’s University. She received her Ph.D. from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California (2016), M.Eng. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, M.Sc. from National University of Singapore, and B.Eng. from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Guang’s research interests include customer choice modeling, assortment planning, revenue management and interfaces between operations management and marketing, accounting and finance. Her work has been published in Operations Research and Operations Research Letters. She is a member of INFORMS.

Christopher Miners is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour. He received his B.Sc. in Psychology from McGill University, and his Ph.D. in Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management from the University of Toronto.

Christopher’s research investigates abilities, personality traits, and intra- and interpersonal processes that facilitate job performance and promote well-being. The focus of his first line of research is on emotional intelligence.

Christopher's current research examines the relations between emotional intelligence and negotiation performance, moral decision-making, and social influence.

A second line of his research investigates the antecedents and the consequences of counternormative behaviour in group contexts. He has published papers on these topics in a variety of journals including the Administrative Science Quarterly, Leadership Quarterly, and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. His research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Christian received his PhD in 2014 from the University of Toronto. His research focuses on techniques for planning under uncertainly, and using planning techniques as a computation core for a range of applications and sub-fields. Recently, his research has focused on the acquisition of action theories; either manually specified or induced in a data-driven fashion. He is also actively exploring methods to combine reasoning and learning for creating complex multi-turn goal-oriented dialogue systems.

Elspeth Murray has served as the Associate Dean - MBA and Master’s Programs from 2012-2022 and has been a professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Smith School of Business since 1996. She also holds the CIBC Fellowship in Entrepreneurship, and founded Centre for Business Venturing. Prior to joining Queen's, she worked in industry for 7 years for several firms including IBM, and Canadian Tire. As an integral part of her work in the strategy and new venture fields, Dr. Murray specializes in the management of change. In 2002, she co-authored a best-selling book, Fast Forward: Organizational Change in 100 Days, Oxford University Press, with Dr. Peter Richardson. She has recently co-developed (with Dr. David Saunders) the Analytics Climate Assessment Tool (ACAT), which is used to assess organizations technological capacity, skill sets, and analytics culture. Current research is focused on best practices in leading and managing change to create an analytics culture.

Dr. Murray teaches on many Smith MBA and Executive Education programs, and consults widely with a diversity of firms including BMW, Detour Gold, Wawanesa Insurance, Versacold Logistics and the Auditor General for Canada. She serves as a Director for several firms and is an advisor to several start-ups and CEO's. Dr. Murray received an undergraduate degree in computer science and mathematics, and an MBA, both from Queen's University. Her doctorate in Strategy and Management Information Systems was completed at the Richard Ivey School of Business.

Arcan Nalca holds a PhD degree in Operations Management from the Desautels Faculty of Management in McGill University, Montreal.

His primary research interest lies in the field of supply chain management, especially in the context of modeling and analyzing practically motivated research problems at the interface of operations and marketing. Issues related to competition, coordination, and contracting in the presence of demand uncertainty constitute some of his research thrusts in this area.

His current teaching interests are in the areas of operations management and operations research; particularly Supply Chain Management, Operations Management, and Strategic Management of Operations/Supply Chains, Inventory Models.

Dr. Nediak is interested in complex Management Science, Operations Research and data analytic problems with a significant computational component. The techniques employed in his research range from integer and nonlinear optimization to control theory and stochastic simulation. His current research focuses on new models in Revenue Management and Dynamic Pricing.

Dr. Nediak has undergraduate and M.Sc. degrees from the Department of Management and Applied Mathematics, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia. He has received his PhD in Operations Research at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Nicole is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University.

As a behavioral scientist her research lies at the intersection of consumer behavior and decision making, with a focus on discovering ways to improve consumer welfare, marketing, and public policy. She uses both laboratory and field experiments to investigate questions across a variety of domains including financial, health and moral decision-making. Her work is published in the Journal of Marketing, Management Science, and the Harvard Business Review and has been presented at numerous international conferences.

In addition to her academic work, Nicole currently serves on the National Financial Literacy Research Sub-Committee for the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada. She has also worked as advisor to the Government of Canada’s Behavioural Insights Unit and the Ontario Government’s Behavioural Insights Unit, where she formally worked as Chief Researcher. Her work on increasing organ donation with the Ontario Government was awarded the prestigious Amethyst award for outstanding achievement.

Professor Schneider received a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University and a B.S. in physics from Wesleyan University. Prior to graduate studies, he worked at NERA Economic Consulting (Oliver Wyman) and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Professor Schneider was an economics professor at the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University before joining Queen’s University. He has a cross-appointment in the Queen's Department of Public Health Sciences, and is an affiliated faculty member of the Queen's Economics Department.

Matthias Spitzmuller is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Smith School of Business.

His research focuses on team motivation/team leadership, and on helping behaviors/cooperative work behaviors and has been published in journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, American Psychologist, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Matthias has taught classes on Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management to undergraduate students, MBA students, and doctoral students. He has also served as a lecturer on leadership in executive education programs at the National University of Singapore and Harvard Business School Publishing. Prior to joining Smith School of Business, Matthias worked as an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. Matthias completed his Ph.D. in Organizational Behaviour under the guidance of Prof. John R. Hollenbeck at Michigan State University.

He also holds an MBA from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Before embarking on his academic career, Matthias worked for Kienbaum Management Consultants as assistant to the CEO and consultant. In his work for Kienbaum, Matthias consulted organizations on Strategic HRM issues and on realigning / reorganizing their HRM.

Dr. Stephen W. Thomas is an adjunct faculty member at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University in Kingston, ON, Canada. Dr. Thomas holds PhD, MSc, and BSc degrees in Computer Science. His main interests are databases, data mining and analytics, and text analytics. His research has been published in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering, and others. He is a recipient of the Scotiabank Scholar research grant. In addition to his role at the Smith, Dr. Thomas runs a tech startup in the world of big data. He consults with many large companies in the areas of big data and text analytics. He previously held an industrial data analytics position at Raytheon in Tucson, AZ. Dr. Thomas teaches several courses on databases, big data analytics, and mathematical analysis in Smith’s Commerce and Masters of Management Analytics (MMA) programs. He serves on the MMA advisory board. Dr. Thomas is member of several academic communities, including the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE, ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (ACM SIGSOFT), and TimeCenter.

Matthew Thompson's research is in real options theory and applications in energy markets. Matthew’s work has gained significant national and international recognition from the operations research community (winner of the best student paper award of the Canadian Operational Research Society and finalist in the prestigious George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award of INFORMS). His work has appeared in Operations Research and Naval Research Logistics. Matt spent time as a risk management consultant for a power generation firm, and was the Associate Director of Financial Engineering at a major Canadian Investment Bank, where he developed mathematical models for the pricing, hedging and trading of financial derivatives.

Jue Wang is an Assistant Professor of Management Science at Smith School of Business. His research lies at the intersection of operations research and statistics, with particular interests in real-time decisions with monitoring data. In addition, he is studying complex revenue management problems through the lens of optimal control theory. Jue has led multiple big data & analytics consulting projects in energy, transportation, and mining industries. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Xi’an Jiaotong University (China) in 2007 and PhD from the University of Toronto in 2013.

Dr. Xiaodan Zhu is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He leads the Text Analytics and Machine Learning Lab (TAML). Dr. Zhu received his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 2010 and his Masters of Engineering from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University in 2000. He was a researcher of National Research Council Canada from 2010 to 2017.

Dr. Zhu and his students published at top machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence conferences and journals such as ICML, ACL, IJCAI, JAIR, IEEE/ACM TASLP, JASIST, JAMIA, NAACL, EACL, IPM, etc. His recent work has received the Adam Kilgarriff *SEM Best Paper Award for Lexical Semantics.

Recently he serves as a Chair for The 33rd Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence. He serves for ACL '19 Best Paper Award Committee. He has been as an Associate Editor for the Computational Intelligence journal since 2015. Dr. Zhu is Co-Chair for SemEval '20, '19; Publication Chair for COLING '18; Area Chair for ACL '19, '18, EMNLP '19, NAACL '19, and COLING '18; Workshop Chair for COLING '20. He is an active reviewer for NIPS, AAAI, AISTATS, IJCAI, ACL, TKDE, EMNLP, ICASSP, TASLP, COLING, JBI, ICASSP, INTERSPEECH, ect.

Dr. Zhu was an Evaluation Group Member of NSERC Discovery Grants (Computer Science Group, 2017), Canada. He also served as an external reviewer for government grants such as Discovery Grants, Industrial Research & Development Fellowship, Research Support for New Academics (Québec), General Research Fund (Hong Kong), and Faculty Development Scheme (Hong Kong). He also helped review startup companies' proposals (e.g., for CDL of University of Toronto).

In the past, Dr. Zhu has worked with industrial research labs either as a research intern (Google (New York), IBM T.J. Watson Research Center), a visiting scholar (Microsoft Research Asia), or as a full-time researcher (Intel's China Research Center).