New Faculty @ FEB

At the start of the academic year 2018-2019, the Faculty of Economics and Business welcomes the following new staff members: Roman Goncharenko, Michal Kobielarz, Bart Larivière, Virginie Mataigne, Tarik Roukny, Estefanía Serral, Ines Simac, Karel Van Acker, Hande Yaman and Sandrine Blanc.

Roman Goncharenko is joining the AFI department as an Assistant Professor of Finance. He earned his PhD from the Vienna Graduate School of Finance (Vienna University of Economics and Business) in 2018. His main research interest lies in the fields of banking and bank regulation. Roman’s secondary fields of research interest include real options, capital structure, economics of networks, and theoretical asset pricing.

Michal Kobielarz is joining the department of Economics as an Assistant Professor in Macroeconomics. He holds a PhD degree from Tilburg University. Michal’s main research interests evolve around the economics of monetary unions, with a particular focus on the causes and dynamics of the Eurozone Crisis. He is also more broadly interested in issues of sovereign debt, inflation dynamics and numerical methods. Prior to joining the department, Michal was a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a consultant at the European Central Bank.

Bart Larivière is joining the Department of Marketing at KU Leuven as an Associate Professor in Marketing. He holds a PhD degree from Ghent University. Bart’s research focuses on the role of customers, employees and technology in service encounters. Bart is passionate about both service marketing and digital marketing. Bart is also the current co-chair of the Service Research Special Interest Group (SERVSIG) of the American Marketing Association (AMA), Adjunct Professor at EMLyon Business School and Research Editor for the Journal of Service Management. Prior to joining the department, Bart was Associate Professor of Service Management at Ghent University.

Virginie Mataigne is joining the AFI department as an Assistant Professor in Finance. She obtained her PhD at Ghent University where she also had a two-year post-doc position. During her PhD Virginie was a visiting scholar at INSEAD, Fontainebleau. Her research focuses primarily on financing aspects of Mergers & Acquisitions as well as competitive implications of Mergers & Acquisitions announcements. She is also interested in more general topics in empirical corporate finance such as seasoned equity offerings and capital structure decisions.

Tarik Roukny is joining the faculty as an Assistant Professor in Finance. He holds a PhD degree from Université Libre de Bruxelles. Tarik's research focuses on the interaction between financial markets, new technologies and regulation. Combining both theoretical and empirical approaches, his work includes financial networks, systemic risk, portfolio compression, central clearing, cryptocurrencies and machine learning. Prior to joining the department,Tarik was a Post-Doc Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his PhD, Tarik was also visiting scholar at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Stanford as well as the Deutsche Bundesbank and the European Central Bank. During the Fall, Tarik is visiting the European Systemic Risk Board.

Estefanía Serral is joining the Departmentof Decision Sciences and Information Management as an Assistant Professor. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Technical University of Valencia. Working at KU Leuven since 2014, she is doing research in topics such as: Internet of Things, ubiquitous business processes, context-adaptive systems and smart learning environments. She was also an Assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology in 2018. From 2012 to 2014, she led the Semantic Knowledge Representation and Integration research group at the CDL-Lab at the Technical University of Vienna. Until 2012, she worked at the Technical University of Valencia (Spain).

Ines Simac is joining the Department of Accounting, Finance and Insurance as an Assistant Professor in Accounting/Auditing. She holds a PhD degree from KU Leuven. Ines’ main research interests are centred around the economics of audit markets, with a particular focus on auditor competition, auditor regulation and auditing in the financial services industry. She is also more broadly interested in bank financial reporting quality as well as banking regulation. In addition, Ines is also involved in research projects related to the human resource aspects of audit firms.

Karel Van Acker is joining the faculty as Professor in Circular Economy (a joint interdisciplinary mandate together with the faculty of Engineering Science). His research is on developing strategies to realise the circular economy (CE) and onsustainability assessments of these CE strategies, including a.o. recycling, materials substitution, sharing economy. Karel holds a PhD in Materials Science and has been for 12 years coordinator of the KU Leuven Materials Research Centre. He also leads the policy research centre “Circular economy” for the Flemish government and currently is the chairman of the Sustainability Council of KU Leuven.

Hande Yaman is joining the ORSTAT group as a Professor in Operations Research. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University in 1997 and 1999, and her Ph.D. degree in Operations Research from Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2002. She worked at the Department of Industrial Engineering at Bilkent University from 2003 to 2018. She spent a year as a visiting researcher at CORE, Universite catholique de Louvain. Her research interests are in polyhedral approaches for integer programming with applications in production planning, logistics, and network design.

Sandrine Blanc is jointly appointed by the Faculty of Economics and Business and the Institute of Philosophy as an Assistant Professor of Business Ethics at the Center for Ethics and Economics. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from University Paris-IV Sorbonne and business degrees from ESCP-EAP and Lancaster University. She was previously at INSEEC Business School in Paris. Her research focuses on normative issues bearing on corporations and contemporary capitalism. She has a particular interest in the significance and implications of social justice for corporations.