Meet Notre Dame’s newest business faculty members

Each fall, the Mendoza College of Business welcomes a new cohort of scholars whose research shapes how the College teaches and thinks about today's business challenges. This year's incoming faculty bring expertise spanning fiscal policy, real estate and asset pricing, business ethics and human-centered AI for underserved populations. Their paths to Mendoza are as varied as their fields. 

Will Cassidy, assistant professor of finance, studies how politics and government policy affect asset prices. He is particularly interested in how U.S. fiscal policy is determined endogenously, the actions of the U.S. Treasury and their joint impact on equity and bond markets.

“Economic and policy news during my early adulthood was dominated by the 2008 financial crisis and the government actions taken in response,” he said. “At the time, my understanding of why particular policies were chosen and how they affected credit markets and the broader economy was very limited. Taking classes in economics and finance gave me a framework for thinking about these questions, but it also raised new ones.”

Cassidy joins Notre Dame from Washington University in St. Louis. He earned his master’s and Ph.D. in finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.   

Bianca He, assistant professor of finance, focuses her research on corporate finance, with an emphasis on intangible capital and its role in shaping firm behavior and financial outcomes. She looks at how assets like technology, brands and customer relationships influence firms’ financing decisions, investment and the broader economy.

She grew up in Shanghai during a time when there was extraordinary economic transformation in China. “I watched China open more fully to global trade, become the ‘factory of the world,’ and then begin moving up the value chain toward higher-margin, more innovative industries,” she said. “That experience made me curious about what allows firms and economies to make that transition.”

She earned an MBA and a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.   

Long He, associate professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations, currently focuses on combining data-driven optimization and machine learning/artificial intelligence to address practical problems in smart city operations, sustainable energy systems and supply chain management. His research is driven by innovative business models such as shared mobility and new technologies including electric s and autonomous vehicles.

“I’ve always been curious about how these emerging technologies can make our daily lives easier while also being more sustainable,” he said. “As data science and AI have taken off, it has become very natural to explore data-driven solutions that make these smart systems more efficient, sustainable and beneficial for everyone.”

He joins Notre Dame from the George Washington University School of Business. He earned his Ph.D. in operations from the University of California, Berkeley.   

Christian Kontz is an assistant professor of finance. Christian’s research sits at the intersection of corporate finance and asset pricing. He studies how delegated asset management, the growth of passive investing, and emerging trends such as ESG shape firms’ decisions and real economic outcomes. He earned his Ph.D. in finance from Stanford Graduate School of Business.   

Rosemarie Monge, associate teaching professor of Business Ethics and Society, was trained as a normative business ethicist. She is interested in foundational questions of managerial moral responsibility and corporate social responsibility.

“Recently, I've been reading early modern thinkers on the merits and demerits of the commercial society, and thinking about how those should color our debates on corporate social responsibility; i.e., the idea that managers have an ethical obligation to go beyond compliance and beyond the pursuit of the firm's self-interest in the market,” she said.

Monge joins the College from the University of St. Thomas. She received her Ph.D. in legal studies and business ethics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.   

Jarek Nabrzyski, associate vice president for research and research professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations, focuses on human-centered artificial intelligence for people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD), those living with dementia, Alzheimer's disease and autism, and their caregivers.

“I build AI-powered assistive communication systems — combining edge AI devices with large language models — that help nonverbal and nonsymbolic individuals express their needs and help caregivers and families understand them,” he said.

Nabryzski has spent most of his career building large-scale computing infrastructure, including for the past 17 years at Notre Dame, where he founded and directed the Center for Research Computing.

“Over time, I became increasingly curious about a simple question: What is all this computational power ultimately for? The answer that gripped me was people who have no voice at all. Individuals with PIMD often cannot speak, sign or point, yet they have rich inner lives and needs their caregivers struggle to interpret.”

A concurrent professor of computer science and engineering, he joins Mendoza's IT, Analytics, and Operations, which he views as the most innovative department on campus. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from Poznan University of Technology.   

Michael C. O'Malley, associate teaching professor and executive director of the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate, was a partner in a real estate private equity firm, Pennybacker, for 17 years, during which the firm raised approximately $4 billion and acquired over $8 billion of real estate.

“Real estate is the largest asset class in the world, greater than all public equities and debt combined. Yet there are always mispricings and unseen opportunities to create value. This is where I spent my career, and what I focus on in my teaching,” he said.

O’Malley (BBA '96) returned to Notre Dame as an adjunct professor in 2020. He joined the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate full-time in 2023 as a professor of the practice, and became a Mendoza faculty member in 2026 when the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate became part of Mendoza. O’Malley earned his MBA from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business.   

Ignacio Rios, associate professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations, focuses his research on behavioral market design, an area at the intersection of economics, operations research and analytics. His interest in the field started before graduate school, when he had the opportunity to work with DEMRE, the institution responsible for Chile’s college admissions system.

During that time, he saw firsthand “both the complexity of these mechanisms and the enormous impact that relatively small design changes could have on hundreds of thousands of students and families.” Rios joins Notre Dame from the University of Texas at Dallas. He earned his Ph.D. in operations and his master’s in economics from Stanford University.   

Clare Wang, the Vincent and Rose Lizzadro Professor of Accountancy, centers her research on corporate disclosures, looking at the effects of legal, regulatory and financial reporting regimes in capital markets and corporate activities. She also studies the broader relevance of corporate reporting in the world, such as the impact of accounting information.

“As my academic work progressed, I came to see the salience of a broader set of institutional and legal factors beyond accounting standards,” she said. “Corporate disclosures offer a fascinating window into how these factors shape firms’ decisions, with important effects for investors and society at large.”

Wang comes to Mendoza from the University of Colorado Boulder Leeds School of Business. She earned her Ph.D. in managerial science and applied economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.   

Victoria Zhang is an assistant professor of Management & Organization. Victoria is an organizational theorist whose research examines how social inequality, segregation, and polarization influence organizational behavior and strategy. She is particularly interested in entrepreneurs in brick-and-mortar businesses and their relationships with local communities. Victoria earned her Ph.D. in economic sociology from the MIT Sloan School of Management.   

Zhiqi Zhang, assistant professor of marketing, is interested in research at the intersection of quantitative marketing, artificial intelligence, causal inference and digital platforms. In particular, she is interested in “designing more effective experiments, developing personalized policies for decisions such as incentives and pricing, and understanding how algorithmic systems such as recommender systems affect both consumers and content creators.”

Zhang has always been drawn to questions that may appear simple at first sight, but become much more complex at scale. For her, she was drawn to Mendoza because it blends “rigorous, high-impact scholarship with a strong sense of purpose.” Zhang earned her Ph.D. in supply chain, operations and technology from Washington University in St. Louis.