Essec Business School

A new academic year has begun, and with it, ESSEC is happy to welcome 21 new faculty members and six new Professors of Management Practice! 

Faculty 

Cristina Alaimo, Associate Professor, Information Systems, Decision Sciences & Statistics 

 

Cristina Alaimo is Associate Professor at ESSEC Business School, France. Prior to that, she was Assistant Professor at LUISS University, Rome, Italy and Surrey Business School, UK. She holds a Ph.D. in Management, Information Systems, and Innovation from LSE - The London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. Her research focuses on the innovation brought about by data-based services and their consequences for organizations and society. She is also interested in studying the broader ecosystem of data exchanges in which digital platforms are embedded and how these new platform ecosystems emerge and evolve. Cristina’s work has been published in journals such as Organization Science, Organization Studies, The Information Society, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations. She is a co-author with Jannis Kallinikos of the book “Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy,” The MIT Press (2024). Cristina is Senior Editor for the European Journal of Information Systems and sits on the Editorial Board of Organization Studies. She is also a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Digital Economy at Surrey Business School, UK.

Sameh Amer, Assistant Professor, Accounting and Management Control 

 

Dr. Amer is Assistant Professor of Accounting and Management Control at ESSEC Business School. He completed his PhD in Accounting at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on understanding the role of auditing in society, with a particular emphasis on the practices and decision-making processes of auditors. He investigates how auditors navigate uncertain and novel practice situations, exploring the underlying dynamics of their professional expertise. Drawing on theoretical insights from socio-organizational perspectives and the sociology of knowledge, Dr. Amer’s work contributes to the broader discourse on auditing as a social practice.

Lars Andraschko, Assistant Professor, Information Systems, Decision Sciences & Statistics 

 

Dr. Lars Andraschko has joined ESSEC Business School as Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Systems, Data Analytics and Operations. He holds a PhD from the University of Augsburg, where he was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Chair of Information Systems and Management. During his doctorate, he also was a visiting scholar at Lund University. Dr. Andraschko's research focuses on the transformative role of digitalization for sustainability. In particular, he is interested in how the use of digital technologies interacts with climate change mitigation. Using both qualitative and quantitative research methods, he aims to address carefully crafted questions that contribute significantly to both theory and societal development. 

Charles Ayoubi, Assistant Professor, Department of Management

 

Charles Ayoubi is joining ESSEC Business School as an Assistant Professor, specializing in innovation management and the impact of diverse individual backgrounds on strategic business outcomes. An alumnus of ESSEC (MiM Grande Ecole) and Centrale Paris (Engineering), he started his research journey with a Ph.D. from EPFL in Switzerland before joining the Harvard Business School (HBS) as a research fellow. His research emphasizes the importance of accounting for heterogeneous backgrounds to enhance the production, evaluation, and diffusion of knowledge across organizations. Charles's work, involving collaborations with NASA, P&G, and Zapier, aims to provide relevant, implementable insights for organizations using methodologies such as field experiments and applied econometrics to explore how individuals integrate technology within firms.

Ebrahim Barzegary, Assistant Professor, Marketing

Ebrahim Barzegary is Assistant Professor of Marketing at ESSEC. He is a quantitative marketing researcher with a background in computer science and economics. His research focuses on developing optimization algorithms to solve marketing problems, particularly in the domain of big data. His paper, "Design and Evaluation of Optimal Free Trials," was featured in Management Science. After several years of industry experience as a data scientist, he returned to academia in 2024 to explore the effects of industry optimizations on individuals, society, and the environment. He also founded the "Marketing for Betterment" project (www.mk4bt.org), with the mission to guide marketing toward societal well-being through creating awareness, fostering research, and building empowerment tools.

Eléonore Brouard, Assistant Professor, Accounting and Management Control 

 

Eléonore Brouard joins the Accounting and Management Control Department as an Assistant Professor. Her PhD thesis from ESCP Business School analyzes the evaluation mechanisms implemented during a call for tenders to select consultants in the public sector. More broadly, her research focuses on the design and use of performance evaluation systems (ratings, rankings) and their ethical dimensions. Eléonore Brouard previously worked as a consultant for public sector organizations, initially in project finance, and then specialized in organizational and accounting consulting.

Paul Gouvard, Assistant Professor, Management

 

Professor Gouvard holds a PhD from HEC Paris and, over the recent years, has been a visiting scholar at Berkeley Haas and an assistant professor at Università Della Svizzera Italiana. His recent work consists of two intertwined research streams. One stream focuses on the multiplicity of ways in which an organization can be (a)typical and audience members' (such as investors or financial analysts) heterogeneous responses to (a)typicality. A second stream focuses on how organizations can have a positive impact on important societal issues, provided they successfully convey the right meanings to their audience. He is an expert on the use of natural language processing (such as word embeddings and topic modelling) in management research. Professor Gouvard’s research has been published in leading academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and the Academy of Management Review.

Li Han, Associate Professor, Economics 

 

Li Han is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at ESSEC Business School, Asia-Pacific Campus. Prior to joining ESSEC, she held the same position at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology from 2016. Her research primarily focuses on the intersection of development economics and political economy, with a particular emphasis on how politics and policies in autocracies shape social mobility domestically and generate international repercussions. While her initial regional expertise was in China, she has broadened her research scope to include Africa and South Asia. Her work has been published in prestigious journals such as The Economic Journal, The Journal of Public Economics, and The Journal of Development Economics.

Ruthanne Huising, Professor, Management 

 

Ruthanne’s research is motivated by the documented difficulty of achieving organizational compliance with regulations, standards, and other ethical and social expectations. To examine this problem, she studies the professions and work that are central in shaping how compliance is understood and practiced within and across organizations. Within organizations she studies how prosocial demands are harmonized, translated, and implemented, analyzing issues of expertise and power. Across organizations, she examines governance processes, including the organized spaces in which stakeholders and members of designated professions interact to negotiate the meaning of organizational compliance and develop resources to facilitate organizational compliance. Ruthanne is regularly invited to share her work with practitioners and her research has directly informed regulatory policy in Canada and the United Kingdom.Her work has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, andRegulation & Governance. Ruthanne is a former deputy editor and senior editor at Organization Science and founder of the Ethnography Atelier, a collaborative space dedicated to teaching qualitative methods and sharing qualitative research. Ruthanne received her Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. She was Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar at McGill University and Professor of Management at Emlyon Business School.

Anne Jacqueminet, Associate Professor, Public & Private Policy 

 

Anne Jacqueminet is Associate Professor in the department of Public & Private Policy. She received her PhD in Strategic Management from HEC Paris and has worked as Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Technology of Bocconi University. In her research, she investigates firms’ heterogenous approaches to the strategic implementation of sustainability practices, with a focus on complex organizations. She also looks at firm-stakeholder interactions as well as stakeholders’ reactions to firms’ social and environmental behavior and disclosure. Her work has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science and the Journal of International Business Studies, among others. She received the AIB Peter Buckley and Mark Casson Best Dissertation Award in 2016 and the AIB Alan Rugman Young Scholar Award in 2021. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS). Prior to joining academia, Anne worked as a consultant in climate change and sustainability for EY.

Junqiu Jiang, Assistant Professor, Marketing

 

Junqiu Jiang is Assistant Professor of Marketing. She is a PhD graduate from Singapore Management University's Lee Kong Chian School of Business. Junqiu’s research focuses on contextual factors that inform marketing actions, which includes research streams that examine organizational processes involved in securing marketing budgets and the influence of corporate political connections and lobbying on marketing actions. She is a multimethod researcher and conducts research using both quantitative and qualitative methods. In her research, Junqiu seeks to impact both theory and practice while promoting sustainable marketing practices. She received her BA. in Fashion Management from the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, and her MSc. in Strategic Marketing from Imperial College London. Prior to her academia, Junqiu worked in the private sector in the luxury fashion, family business, mining, and finance industries, spanning different geographic regions including South Africa, UK, France, China and Singapore.

Mikolaj Kasprzak, Assistant Professor, Information Systems, Decision Sciences & Statistics 

 

Mikołaj obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the University of Warwick and his DPhil in Statistics from the University of Oxford. After completing his DPhil, he joined the Mathematics Department at the University of Luxembourg as a postdoctoral research associate. Later, he obtained a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual (Global) Fellowship, sponsored by the EU. During the outgoing phase of the fellowship, he worked at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT and undertook a short secondment at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London (UCL). He then returned to Luxembourg for the incoming phase of the fellowship, after which he joined ESSEC. In his research, Mikołaj is interested in providing rigorous quality guarantees for various approximations arising in applied probability, statistics and machine learning.  

Victor Saint Jean, Assistant Professor, Finance 

Victor Saint Jean is Assistant Professor of Finance. He is a financial economist interested in Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Governance. He holds a PhD in Economics from Sciences Po. His research has been presented at major finance conferences and has received multiple awards, including the "Brattle Group PhD Candidate Award for Outstanding Research" (WFA 2023).

Lutz Sager, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics 

Lutz Sager is Assistant Professor in the Economics Department of ESSEC. He is an environmental economist who studies the costs of and solutions to climate change and air pollution. His work highlights distributional considerations, looking for policy instruments that are both effective and equitable. Before joining ESSEC, Dr. Sager was Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and a Research Fellow of the CESifo Network. His work has been published in leading academic journals, featured in media outlets worldwide (e.g. Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times), as well as referenced by governments and international organizations.

Ghalia Shameyleh, Assistant Professor, Marketing 

Ghalia Shamayleh has a BSc in Economics with a concentration in Marketing from the Wharton School of Business and an MSc and PhD in Marketing from Concordia University. Her research interests and projects pertain to digital consumption phenomena. She is a consumer researcher; the topics that she currently investigates concern digital affective networks, digital self-expression, digitized interpersonal services, and shifts in consumption practices. She published a book chapter entitled “From Blogs to Platforms: Content Landscape and Affordances,” in the Routledge Handbook of Digital Consumption. She has presented her research at several academic conferences, such as Association for Consumer Research Conference, Consumer Culture Theory Conference, the Annual Graduate Exposition at Concordia University, and the Montreal Business Schools’ Ph.D. Symposium. She has also published media articles in The Conversation, The Montreal Gazette, and Premières en affaires and discussed her research on radio (Global News Radio 630CHED, CBC) and podcasts (Tales of Consumption). 

Angela Sutan, Associate Professor, Public & Private Policy 

Angela Sutan is a professor in sustainability in the Public and Private Policy Department at ESSEC. She mainly uses behavioral and experimental economics tools in her research. Dr. Sutan has been published in Management Science, Ecological Economics, Games and Economic Behavior. She has obtained several national and international research grants on topics related to environmental issues and social behavior. She has experience in science communication and sharing pedagogical innovations: her work has been published in the press (Harvard Business Review, The Conversation, Le Monde). She was part of the Ministry of Research Exhibition "145 women talk about science" and coordinated the Big Experiment (la Grande Experience Participative) for the Researchers' Night. 

Emiliano Traversi, Associate Professor, Information Systems, Decision Sciences & Statistics 

Emiliano Traversi is Associate Professor in the Information Systems, Decision Sciences & Statistics department. He received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Bologna. Prior to joining ESSEC Business School, he was a Full Professor with LIRMM, Université de Montpellier, France. His research interests include Mathematical Optimization, Decomposition methods, Quantum Computing, Machine Learning and Autonomous systems.

Canberk Ucel, Assistant Professor, Information Systems, Decision Sciences & Statistics 

Canberk Ucel is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at ESSEC Business School. His research focuses on challenges faced by small firms and micro-enterprises, which employ two-thirds of the global workforce. Currently, his work in the agriculture sector uses operational data from thousands of farms, collected through industry partnerships, to offer practical insights for companies and policymakers. His studies, which have earned academic awards and industry recognition, emphasize the economic, social, and environmental impact of micro-enterprises. Lately, he has been exploring digital advisory tools based on Large Language Models to aid practice/technology adoption. Canberk holds a PhD and MSc from The Wharton School. He previously taught at Bilkent University and continues to collaborate with the Sustainable Business Initiative at INSEAD, where he served as a Visiting Scholar.

Alentina Vardanyan, Assistant Professor, Management 

Professor Vardanyan’s research is at the nexus of AI and creativity in the workplace. She examines how and why individuals collaborate and co-create with AI, the psychological mechanisms underlying these decisions, and the subsequent influence on employee creativity and innovation. Her PhD is in Organizational Behavior from the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. In her work, she employs quantitative and qualitative methods to bring a well-rounded approach to our understanding of the behavioral implications of co-working with AI. 

Miklos Vari, Assistant Professor, Finance 

Miklos Vari is Assistant Professor of Finance. His research focuses on banks and central banks interventions in financial markets. Prior to joining ESSEC he served as a Research Economist at the Bank of France, as an Economist at the International Monetary Fund and as an Analyst in the Market Operations department of the European Central Bank. He holds a PhD from the Paris School of Economics. 

Sheryl Zhang, Assistant Professor, Accounting and Management Control 

Sheryl Zhang is Assistant Professor of Accounting and Management Control. She completed her Ph.D. in Accounting at Washington University in Saint Louis.  Her research primarily focuses on regulation, ESG, and disclosure. Her dissertation investigates the short-termism in mandated frequent environmental disclosure, offering a new perspective to understand the conventionally long-term outlook of ESG disclosure. Using project-level data, this study examines whether increasing the frequency of mandatory emission disclosure induces firms to shift from long-term beneficial initiatives (clean technology) to short-term oriented environmental projects (end-of-pipe solutions). 

Professors of Management Practice

Maria Allayioti, Professor of Management Practice, Information Systems, Data Analytics and Operations 

Maria Allayioti is Professor of Management Practice in the Information Systems, Decision Sciences and Statistics department at ESSEC. She earned her PhD in Statistics from the University of Southern California in 2023. Following that, she served as a Teaching Professor at the same university and worked as a data scientist at an automotive industry startup. She is enthusiastic about teaching statistics and data science and committed to employing innovative pedagogical methods.

Guillaume Areou, Professor of Management Practice, Public & Private Policy

Guillaume Aréou is Professor of Management Practice in the Public & Private Policy department. He is an independent lawyer specialized in International Arbitration. He has over ten years’ experience in an American law firm. After his Ph.D. in International Investment Law from Nice University, he worked for over ten years in an American Law firm. He advises clients on commercial and investment arbitration matters, with a particular focus on Africa/Middle-East related disputes. Guillaume assists both investors and States alike in complex arbitration proceedings under a variety of seats and arbitration rules, spanning various industry sectors (including, but not limited to, the construction, energy and food sectors). He regularly publishes and speaks at events on international arbitration and on issues related to the environment and compliance. As a co-founder of AfricArb, a non-profit organization that aims to promote Alternative Dispute Resolution mechanisms, Guillaume gives trainings on International Arbitration at African Universities.

Noha El Attar, Professor of Management Practice, Management

Noha El Attar is Professor of Management Practice in Organizational Behavior at ESSEC and the Academic Associate Director of the Global BBA, at ESSEC’s Rabat campus. Previously she worked as an Organizational Consultant, Researcher, Management lecturer in multiple Business Schools in France and China. On the corporate side, she worked with companies like Lux Space in Luxembourg, BIS in Switzerland, Manga Productions in the Middle East, Oracle, Siemens and Etisalat in Egypt. She is an expressive art director, psychodramatist, enthusiastic nerd, a backpack traveller... the most appropriate title depends on the time of the day! Her research interests are in Organizational Justice theory, Role Theory, Visual methods, Art Based Qualitative methods, Improvisation in Organizations and Gender.

Philippe Le Corre, Professor of Management Practice, Public & Private Policy 

Affiliated professor for one year and temporary lecturer for three years at ESSEC, Philippe Le Corre is now a Professor of Management Practice in Geopolitics, specializing in Asia, while maintaining his role as Head of the Asia Program at IRENE.  Philippe Le Corre has a dual background in political science and Asian studies (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales) and also studied at Harvard, where he chaired the Harvard Club of France for two years.  Having worked abroad for 23 years (Asia, UK, twice in the USA until 2020), Philippe Le Corre has a wide range of international experience: international affairs adviser to the French Minister of Defense (and the Minister’s “pen”); Asia analyst at the Armed Forces Ministry; senior executive in charge of Asia at the Publicis group; and, in the early days, Asia correspondent for Radio France Internationale and the weekly Le Point. For the past 10 years, Philippe Le Corre has been a researcher specializing in Chinese and Asian issues: he has worked for two of the biggest American think-tanks, Brookings and Carnegie, as well as at Harvard, and is now attached to the Asia Society Policy Institute. Philippe Le Corre has taught at Johns Hopkins University, HEC, Sciences Po, INALCO and the St-Cyr military academy, and has published 5 books and numerous academic articles on China. Regularly called upon by the media (CNBC, CNN, BBC, Radio France...), Philippe Le Corre is a columnist for Les Echos, Ouest France and Nikkei. 

Oscar Sand, Professor of Management Practice, Marketing

Oscar Sand is Professor of Management Practice in the marketing department at ESSEC. She is a luxury practitioner and educator with over 20 years of experience in brand management and marketing. She has extensive experience in the luxury sector with a track record of successfully marketing prestigious fashion brands, including Giorgio Armani and Hugo Boss. Oscar had offered consultation to a broad range of luxury brands including Audemars Piguet, Bulgari, BMW, Ermenegildo Zegna, Girard-Perregaux, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Montblanc, Maybach of Mercedes, Martell, Omega, Piaget, etc.

She has taught many luxury courses for business institutions such as HEC Lausanne and Emlyon. Work and living experience in Asia and Europe, she is a culturally competent and empathetic leader. Her expertise spans the areas of branding and marketing, digital strategy, customer experience and online and offline activations (PR, events, retail marketing, sponsorship, etc.). Her mission is to make brands and future leaders in luxury shine!

Bamdad Shams, Professor of Management Practice, Public & Private Policy 

Dr. Shams has been newly appointed as a Professor of Management Practice in Business Law at ESSEC Business School. He holds a PhD in Law from Sciences Po Paris, and his research focuses on corporate sustainability in Asia.  He is particularly interested in the law-making activities of multinational corporate actors as private legislators when operating in Asian countries, as well as the normative conflicts that may arise across different areas of law between the privately created norms and the existing legal framework of the Asian host countries. Dr Shams is also an active member of the Paris Bar, practicing business law in France, and he is qualified to practice law in Luxembourg. He has years of practical legal experience in various areas of law, both in legal advice and litigation.