Four new faculty join Smith

Kingston, Ont. — Smith School of Business is pleased to welcome four new faculty members whose expertise will strengthen the school’s commitment to excellence in teaching, research and industry engagement.

The new hires expand the school’s capacity for impactful research and instructors in high-priority areas. They are:

Wren Montgomery, Quinn Professor of Sustainability

Professor Montgomery, who has been a faculty member at Ivey Business School since 2018, returned to Smith in July, where she completed her PhD. She is the first to receive the Quinn Professorship, established through a gift from the Quinn Family Future Foundation to cultivate excellence in the teaching of sustainability concepts at Smith. Professor Montgomery’s research focuses on firms’ environmental communications, specifically identifying greenwashing, its tactics and strategies to stop it. Her work has been published in leading journals and been cited in, and contributed to, regulatory and legislative processes in Canada. She also has a forthcoming book on how honest firms win in a world of spin. On the teaching side, Professor Montgomery has created experiential learning components involving corporate and community partners, and has designed and delivered courses across undergraduate, MBA, and executive programs focused on strategy and sustainability, systems thinking, and evidence based evaluation of sustainability claims.

Lance Ferris, Smith Professor of Organizational Behaviour

Professor Ferris joined Smith in July from Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa. His work focuses on justice, self-esteem, deviance, and how employees respond to treatment at work. He has a substantial body of work in top journals, which has accumulated more than 13,000 citations. Professor Ferris has taught across undergraduate, master’s and doctoral programs. He also has extensive experience supervising graduate students; he’s served on dozens of PhD dissertation committees, supervised multiple MSc theses, and engaged in extensive external examiner work in Canada, the U.S. and Singapore. Professor Ferris’ current and prior students regularly coauthor publications with him in top journals.

Afrouz Hojati, Assistant Professor of Digital Technology

Professor Hojati joined Smith in July from Haskayne School of Business, where she completed her PhD studies and was a postdoctoral associate in business technology management. Professor Hojati’s research examines platform governance and content moderation and has been published in Information Systems Research (ISR), one of the two premier journals in the Information Systems field. In the classroom, Professor Hojati has also taught multiple sections of data analytics and introduction to business analytics at the University of Calgary. Her teaching materials and student feedback reflect a student‑centred, applied approach that integrates analytical tools with real‑world digital examples.

Jean-Étienne de Bettignies, Smith Professor of Business Economics

Professor de Bettignies is a familiar face at Smith, having held a faculty role from 2007-2022. He rejoined Smith in January from Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He is a leading scholar whose research lies at the intersection of business economics, entrepreneurship and strategic management. His work integrates theoretical modeling and empirical analysis to address fundamental questions about how firms finance innovation, structure internal organizations, allocate talent and engage with their institutional and social environments. Professor de Bettignies’ research has been published in prestigious economics and management journals. As an educator, Professor de Bettignies’ teaching portfolio spans managerial economics, organizational economics, entrepreneurship, and the economics of strategic management, reflecting both his disciplinary breadth and his pedagogical versatility. Over the course of his career, he has developed and delivered 12 different courses across undergraduate, MBA, EMBA, MSc, PhD and specialized finance programs and won several teaching awards.