Expanding Expertise

Tenure-Track Faculty

Milad Armaghan

Assistant Professor | Department of Decision & Information Sciences 

“I'm very excited to start this career at Bauer. I want to expand my research, and there's a great faculty here that I can collaborate with. There’s also a great student body who I can learn from and teach my skills to.” 

Armaghan will be joining the Decision and Information Sciences department, specifically in supply chain management. He is joining Bauer after serving as a postdoctoral associate at Southern Methodist University.  While there, Armaghan worked in operations research and engineering management. 

Armaghan received his Ph.D. in operations management and MS in supply chain management, both from the University of Texas at Dallas. He has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. 

Yanyan Li 

Assistant Professor | Department of Marketing & Entrepreneurship 

“Bauer is such an innovative and dynamic group in marketing. We have a lot of really well known scholars here. Bauer has a lot to offer, to explore different topics and then to develop my research. I'm really looking forward to contributing to the group.” 

Li will be joining the Marketing & Entrepreneurship department, specifically teaching marketing analytics.  Li has previous teaching experience at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business where she taught introduction to marketing analytics.  

Li has a Ph.D. in quantitative marketing from the University of Southern California. She also has a MS in quantitative marketing from Columbia Business School. At Renmin University of China, Li earned her MA and a Ph.D. in business administration. She also holds a business administration degree from Nankai University.  

Hunter Pearson  

Assistant Professor | Department of
Accounting & Taxation 

“Bauer has a great accounting faculty, very accomplished researchers with a lot of experience and expertise, so I’m looking forward to working with them and learning from them. I’m also looking forward to teaching intermediate financial accounting.” 

After finishing his Ph.D. in accounting from the University of Oregon, Pearson will be joining Bauer this fall. Pearson was a lab instructor for an introduction to financial accounting course for three years while in Oregon.  

He received both a Master of Financial Management and a BBA in accounting and business honors from Texas A&M University. 

J. Daniel Zyung

Associate Professor | Department of Management & Leadership  

“I’m going to try my best to deliver what I can to the students and provide the most for them.” 

Before joining Bauer, Zyung was Assistant Professor of Strategy at Southern Methodist University. His research centers on three related areas: corporate leaders and their influences on organizational outcomes, corporate governance and the decision making of non-executive stakeholders. 

He received his Ph.D. from Rice University in 2017. 

Johannes Klausmann 

Assistant Professor | Department of Finance 

“There are so many things I’m excited about, primarily working on my research which is related to sustainability and energy finance. Houston is such a big energy hub there’s really no better place to do research on these topics.” 

Klausmann is joining the Bauer family as a Presidential Frontier Faculty hire, an initiative to bring in top scholars from around the globe.  

Before joining Bauer, Klausmann was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Darden School of Business and the Mayo Center for Asset Management. Klausmann conducts research on Climate Finance, Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) and Empirical Corporate Finance. 

Klausmann completed his Ph.D. in Finance at ESSEC Business School in Paris, and he also holds an MSc in Finance from UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School in Dublin. 

Elif Demirag Burak   

Adjunct Faculty | Department of Management & Leadership 

“I really hope my students will have the perspective of looking at everything from the angle of a psychologist and understanding people as human beings.” 

Burak is a social and industrial/organizational psychologist. Before coming to Bauer, she was a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oklahoma. She obtained her degree from the Leadership Lab at Koc University in Turkey. Before moving to the U.S., she worked at the Interpersonal Behavior Lab at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland as a visiting doctoral fellow.  

Her primary research area is leadership, along with other interests such as nonverbal behavior, conflict resolution and emotions. 

Baifu Chen 

Adjunct Professor | Department of Management & Leadership 

“I want to teach my students not only the knowledge of how they can run a successful business, but what kind of person they want to be in the future.” 

Chen is a Ph.D. in Strategic Management at Rice University. He has a Master’s in Mathematic of Finance from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Economics in Corporate Finance from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.  

He believes the best way students can learn is from their peers, and that when teaching the fundamentals it is important to apply them to the real world of business. He is also an avid sports fan and is excited to watch as many games as he can. 

Colin Davies

Adjunct Faculty | Department of Management & Leadership 

“I really want to engage with the students. I hope they take away a more sophisticated, nuanced view of carbon management.” 

Davies is a senior corporate strategy leader with extensive global experience delivering value from organic growth, M&A, technology transformation and large-scale performance improvement. 

He’s worked extensively with energy industry boards and executive teams leveraging his corporate, investment management and partner-level management consultancy experience. Davies is an expert on energy economics and navigating Energy Transition. 

He has a Master of Engineering in Chemical Engineering from the Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of London. 

Elena Farah

Professor of Practice | Department of Management & Leadership 

“I am always impressed with the students from the University of Houston. I have worked with first-generation students, veterans and a large number of students from multicultural backgrounds, and they always feel comfortable to bring their experiences into the classroom.” 

Farah is an experienced academic, public finance analyst and nonprofit strategist with more than two decades of practice across the fields of public accountability, policy design and global management education.  

With a career spanning academia, philanthropy, municipal finance and social impact consulting, Elena brings a unique interdisciplinary lens to her work — fusing analytical rigor with a passion for teaching and innovation. 

Jessie George

Professor of Practice | Department of Accounting & Taxation  

“I'm looking forward to seeing the students and being able to teach them new and exciting things in accounting that they might not know already.” 

George is a seasoned accounting expert, joining Bauer after experience in higher education and the Big Four.  George has been a content developer in CPA exam review at UWorld Accounting since 2022. She’s also previously taught accounting at the University of Houston-Downtown and Houston Christian University.  

George received her Ph.D. in business administration with a specialization in advanced accounting from Northcentral University. She also holds an MS in management information systems and a BBA in accounting from Texas A&M University. 

Amy C. Horner  

Professor of Practice | Department of
Marketing & Entrepreneurship
Academic Director of the Executive DBA Program 

“This fall, one of the things I'm the most excited about is that we are welcoming our third cohort. We just started with cohorts two years ago in 2023. But in addition to welcoming our third cohort, our first cohort is going into their final year. So, they're working on their dissertations with anticipated graduation in May of 2026. So, it's a really watershed year for us.”

Horner has work experience inside and outside the lecture hall. As a CPA, Horner has many years of experience working in various accounting-related roles. Before Bauer, Horner was an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. 

While at UNC Charlotte, Horner earned her DBA from the university. She also holds an MBA from Penn State University and a BS in accounting from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.  

Douglas Reinarz 

Adjunct Faculty | Department of Finance 

“I’m looking forward to having a lively and interesting class. I hope to have interactive students who are engaged with the material and excited to discuss." 

Reinarz has experience in banking across a wide variety of industries. His most recent position before coming to Bauer was as the Director and Senior RM for Citizens Bank. He is experienced in both Product & Relationship Management. 

He prefers working with clients to solve problems and meet their needs, or to coach up-and-coming bankers to help them reach their potential.  

Marina Ruseva 

Instructional Assistant Professor | Department of Accounting & Taxation  

“I look forward to returning home. Bauer and UH, that’s my alma mater, that’s where I grew up in a way, so I look forward to getting home where awesome happens and all that it has to offer.”  

Ruseva has an established background in accounting, most recently as an assistant professor at Lamar University. She’s taught several courses, at Lamar and Bauer, related to accounting and tax. Ruseva also has five years of experience as a senior tax consultant at Deloitte.  

Ruseva is a UH alumna, earning her BBA, MS and Ph.D. all in accounting from Bauer.  

Adam Duval

Professor of Practice | Department of Decision & Information Sciences

“I look forward to the excitement of sharing my knowledge and skills with students. I’m also happy to help them advance their careers and obtain up to date knowledge in information sciences. I also look forward to reuniting with my former colleagues there, professors and also meeting new people.” 

Duval joins Bauer from Washington State University, where he was a data and strategy associate. Throughout his career in education, Duval has taught across the globe in Kazakhstan and has previously been a data analyst at the University of Houston. 

Duval earned a Ph.D. in accounting and finance from the University of Manchester. He has an MS in management information systems from UH and an MBA in finance and banking from Hofstra University. 

Shweta Oza 

Adjunct Faculty | Department of Marketing & Entrepreneurship 

“I am most excited to meet the student body and the diversity and caliber of the students that I have found by looking just at my roster. I'm really excited to be a part of their world and for them to be a part of mine.” 

Oza is bringing her expertise as an entrepreneurial success coach and mentor to the Marketing & Entrepreneurship department. Oza has several years of teaching experience, teaching marketing and business courses at the University of Miami, University of Maryland and Gujarat University. 

Oza has a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Maryland. She also has an MBA in marketing and international business from the University of Delaware and a BS in physics from Gujarat University.