Belk College appoints new faculty advisors for graduate programs

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Three graduate programs in the Belk College of Business have new faculty advisors for the 2012-13 academic year.

Chris Kirby, professor of finance and economics, is the new director for the Ph.D. in Business Administration, finance major. Kirby joined the Belk College faculty in 2011. Before coming to UNC Charlotte, he held tenured appointments in economics at Clemson University and in finance at the University of Texas at Dallas.  His research interests include asset pricing, empirical finance and financial econometrics with a particular emphasis on understanding the implications of time-varying reward and risk characteristics in financial markets. He holds a Ph.D. from Duke University.
 

Weidong Tian, professor of finance and distinguished professor of risk management and insurance, is the new director of the Master of Science in Mathematical Finance program. Prior to coming to UNC Charlotte in 2008, he was an associate professor at the University of Waterloo. Tian’s research interests are asset pricing, derivative and risk management. A visiting scholar at the Sloan School of Business at MIT for fall 2010, Tian holds a Ph.D. from McGill University.
 

Dustin Read, clinical assistant professor of finance and director of the UNC Charlotte Center for Real Estate, is the director of the Master of Science in Real Estate, which enrolled its first class of students this semester. Read joined the Belk College of Business in 2007 as associate director of the Center for Real Estate; he was appointed director in 2011. He received his Ph.D. in public policy from UNC Charlotte and his J.D. from University of Missouri at Columbia. Read’s teaching and research activities primarily focus on real estate development and land use regulations.