Anton Ivanov is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems and the Deloitte Foundation Center for Business Analytics Scholar (2023, 2024) at the Department of Business Administration at the Gies College of Business. He received his PhD in Management Science and Systems from the School of Management at the University at Buffalo. His research stands at the intersection of information systems, social media, and healthcare with a focus on data analytics. His area of methodological expertise includes empirical analysis, econometrics, machine-learning, and mixed-methods involving qualitative analysis. His teaching interests include Business Intelligence, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, and Social Media Strategy, among others, and he regularly earns recognition on the “List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent.” He has also received grants from C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, Jump ARCHES, and the Gies Faculty Grant.

Assistant Professor

Anton Ivanov

David Molitor is an Associate Professor and Hewitt Faculty Fellow in the Department of Finance at Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is Director of Gies Health Initiatives at Gies College of Business and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Molitor’s research explores how location and the environment shape health and health care delivery in the United States. He is a Principal Investigator of the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study, a large-scale field experiment of workplace wellness conducted at the University of Illinois. Molitor was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. from the University of Minnesota.

Associate Professor

David Molitor

Julian Reif is an Associate Professor of Finance and Economics at Gies College of Business, University of Illinois. He is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, J‐PAL North America, the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities, and the Institute of Government and Public Affairs. He is an applied microeconomist whose research focuses on the determinants and value of health. He has studied the health and medical spending effects of air pollution, the health and drug utilization effects of Medicare Part D, and the value of medical innovation. He is also a Principal Investigator of the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study. He currently serves as co-editor at The American Journal of Health Economics. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago and his BA from Vanderbilt University. Before pursuing his PhD, he worked as a Senior Consultant at Bates White.

Associate Professor

Julian Reif

Michael Penn Jr. has been a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Accountancy since May 2018 and is currently a Deloitte Foundation Data Analytics Center Scholar. At UIUC, he taught in four substantially different areas of accounting, including a 300-level introductory taxation course, a 400-level advanced financial reporting course, a 500-level managerial accounting course, and a 500-level data analytics applications course. He will teach ACCY 575 Data Analytics Applications in Accountancy during both semesters of the 2025/2026 academic year. He holds a BSBA and a MAcc degree from the University of Arizona and a PhD from the Pennsylvania State University. He presented multiple teaching cases at the MSA/IMA Teaching Case Conference, and in 2023, he coauthored a case published in Strategic Finance for the IMA’s 2024 International Student Case Competition. Prior to UIUC, he was a faculty member at Florida State University, where he served as an assistant professor in the College of Business Accounting Department.

Senior Lecturer

Michael Penn Jr.

Dr. Mohammad Moshref-Javadi joined the IOSA area at the Department of Business Administration in August 2021. He serves as the Director of the Illinois SCM Corporate Affiliate Program. He mainly focuses on analytics in supply chain, operations, and logistics, and he received the outstanding research award from the Department of Business Administration in 2022 and has appeared in the list of teachers ranked as excellent for several semesters at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He teaches several courses in analytics and supply chain. Before working at the Gies College of Business, he taught several courses in Data Science and Analytics in Logistics and Supply Chain at Northeastern University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2018-2021. He has also worked on several real-world analytics projects with industries at the Center for Transportation and Logistics at MIT from 2017 to 2019 and in the state of Indiana from 2013 to 2017.

Teaching Assistant Professor

Mohammad Moshref - Javadi

Unnati Narang is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration (Marketing) at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research lies at the intersection of mobile marketing, consumer mobility, and engagement in digital environments. She uses causal modeling, econometrics, machine learning, and deep learning approaches to examine these research themes. Her research has been published/accepted at Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Review of Marketing Research. She received her PhD in Marketing from Mays Business School, Texas A&M University in May 2020. She also won the Poets&Quants’ Best 50 Undergrad Professor Honor in 2023.

Assistant Professor

Unnati Narang

Linden (Zhenzhong) Lu is an instructor in the Department of Accountancy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Linden has over 20 years of industry experience as a software engineer and consultant. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, an M.S. in Computer Science from Indiana University, and a Master of Science in Finance (MSF) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been on the U of I faculty since 2017. Linden is passionate about teaching, and he has been on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent every year.

Instructor

Linden Lu

Li Zhang is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Accountancy at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her MBA from the University of Oregon and her Ph.D. in Accounting from Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining Gies, she was a faculty member at UCLA. She also served as an interim CFO at an AI startup. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Accounting Education. At Gies, she teaches both financial and managerial accounting and is deeply committed to supporting students from diverse backgrounds, particularly those who find accounting challenging. Her teaching excellence has been consistently recognized, earning her a place on the university’s list of Teachers Ranked as Excellent each year.

Teaching Assistant Professor

Li Zhang

Robert Brunner is the Chief Disruption Officer at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he is also a Professor of Accounting and holds an Arthur Andersen Fellowship. Since joining Gies in 2017, he has helped guide efforts to incorporate emerging technologies into business education and operations. He currently holds affiliate positions in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Physics, and Statistics, as well as at the Beckman Institute and NCSA. His primary research focuses on applying statistical and machine learning methods to real-world problems, with an emphasis on improving the speed, accuracy, and accessibility of these techniques. Brunner holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the Johns Hopkins University. He completed postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology.

Professor

Robert Brunner

Wei Zhu is an associate professor of accountancy and a KPMG faculty fellow in Gies College of Business. He earned his Ph.D. in accounting from Yale School of Management and joined Gies as an assistant professor in 2013. He conducts archival financial accounting research and is interested in interdisciplinary topics at the intersections of financial reporting, asset pricing, and sustainability. He currently serves on the editorial boards of two top accounting journals – The Accounting Review and Contemporary Accounting Research. Wei teaches the master’s-level course Data Analytics Applications in Accountancy and has repeatedly qualified for the “List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by their Students” since 2016. In 2022, he received the Raymond A. Hoffman Faculty Excellence Award for Research and Teaching at the Department of Accountancy.

Associate Professor

Wei Zhu

Ying Bao is an Assistant Professor at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a Ph.D. in Marketing, an M.A. in Economics, and a B.Sc. in Financial Economics from the University of Toronto. Her research blends applied microeconomic theory with reduced-form econometrics and centers around platform and food marketing, with a strong emphasis on policy relevance. She has published in top journals such as Management Science and PNAS Nexus. At Gies, she teaches Business Analytics, Consumer Analytics, and Marketing Research, and has repeatedly been named to the university’s List of Excellent Teachers.

Assistant Professor

Ying Bao