The magazine for alumni and friends of the UB School of Management
Issue link: http://ubschoolofmanagement.uberflip.com/i/1210017
20 Buffalo Business Spring 2020 Insights Meet our new faculty The school welcomed five new full- time faculty members in fall, enhancing our strengths in teaching and research. Michael J. Braunscheidel is a clinical assistant professor of operations manage- ment and strategy. With a doctorate from the UB School of Management, he teaches production and operations management and supply chain management. In his research, he focuses on supply chain agility and resilience. A fan of the Sabres, Bills and Yankees, Braunscheidel likes to garden, travel with his wife (especially to Europe), and spend time with his family, especially his six granddaughters and grandson. Joshua A. Khavis came on board as an assistant professor of accounting and law. He earned his PhD from Temple University and teaches financial accounting and data analytics for accountants. His research specialties are financial accounting and reporting, auditing and crowdsourcing— including how it facilitates the flow of information to markets. In his free time, Khavis enjoys biking, hiking and rock climbing with his family. Scott Ptak joined the school as a clinical assistant professor of operations manage- ment and strategy and has a doctorate in geography from UB. His teaching expertise includes global economics, communication literacy for business, strategic manage- ment and international business and trade. For research, he is interested in the inter- national location strategies of firms, partic- ularly banks. For fun, Ptak enjoys running, hiking and cooking new recipes. Min-Hsuan Tu is an assistant prof- essor of organization and human resources. She earned her doctoral degree from the University of Florida and teaches organizational behavior and human resource management. Tu's research is in the areas of leader identity and devel- opment, abusive supervision and power and influence. Tu enjoys making desserts (tiramisu is a favorite) and oil painting. (See one of her paintings at right.) Szu-Yin ( Jennifer) Wu is a clinical assistant professor of finance and PhD graduate of the School of Management. She teaches corporate finance, investment management and international financial management. Her research interest is in corporate finance, primarily mergers and acquisitions, shareholder activism, corporate governance and corporate innovation. Wu loves a good Zumba workout and does quite a bit of it in her leisure time. Khavis Ptak Tu Wu Braunscheidel ABOVE: Braunscheidel and his wife in Prague RIGHT: A painting by Tu BELOW: Wu in the Himalayas Finding the right balance of cloud computing resources School of Management research- ers have developed a solution manag- ing cloud computing resources more cost-effectively. Published in Information Systems Research, the study integrates concepts and methods from computer science, machine learning, operations manage- ment and statistics into algorithms that can be applied to a number of different virtual computing environments. "Our findings are most relevant to infrastructure-as-a-service providers, who provide the physical hardware like servers and networking equipment for cloud computing, but they can easily be extended to platform-as-a-service environments as well," says Ram Ramesh, professor of management science and systems. To validate the perfor- mance of their model, the researchers developed use cases based on actual pricing and service data from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Based on these cases, their framework can achieve up to 30% cost savings compared to the traditional resource management model. The researchers say their find- ings will have the greatest impact for cloud service contract administrators, Ramesh