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The Leavey School of Business is excited to welcome eight new tenure-track and teaching-track faculty this year across accounting, finance, information systems and analytics, management and entrepreneurship, and marketing. Learn more about our newest faculty members below.

Accounting

Summer Zhao, Assistant Professor

Summer Zhao joins the accounting faculty this fall after earning her PhD in accounting from the University of California, Berkeley. At Leavey, she teaches ACTG 120, Accounting Data Analysis and Visualization.

Zhao's research focuses on corporate disclosures and information intermediaries, and how their interactions influence capital markets, using AI-driven textual analysis. She's also interested in how boards of directors and shareholders influence, and potentially discipline, managerial disclosure behavior.

Before joining academia, Zhao spent seven years in auditing, accounting advisory services, and corporate accounting in the San Francisco Bay Area. Outside of work, she enjoys traveling, reading, cooking, and spending time with her family.

Finance

Zong Huang, Assistant Professor

Zong Huang joins the finance faculty this fall. His work sits at the intersection of public finance and industrial organization, focusing on the general equilibrium effects of taxes and regulations, with a particular interest in real estate markets. His research has appeared in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and has been presented at conferences including the National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute.

Huang earned his PhD in economics from Stanford University this year and holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics and economics from Northwestern University.

Devon Coombs, CPA, MBA, Assistant Teaching Professor

Devon Coombs joins Leavey as Faculty Director of Real Estate Finance and an assistant teaching professor of finance. He's also the founder of Devon Coombs LLC, where he advises executives and develops education programs at the intersection of finance, accounting, artificial intelligence, and business strategy.

Before Leavey, Coombs built his career at Deloitte, Riveron, and Google Cloud, where he worked as a finance and technical accounting leader alongside CFOs, chief accounting officers, and other executives on major commercial and strategic matters, including technology partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, and complex transactions representing more than $100 billion in aggregate value. Through his firm, he now advises public companies, growth-stage businesses, and professional-services firms on transaction structuring, technical accounting, M&A diligence, and applied AI.

Coombs has taught finance, accounting, real estate, and business topics for more than eight years across universities, community colleges, and professional education programs, training more than 10,000 professionals along the way. He's the author of The 10 Laws of Finance, a recurring contributor to the Financial Executives Journal, and shares his perspective through the Gaapsavvy and Ambition Aligned podcasts.

Information Systems and Analytics

Sofia Bapna, Associate Professor

Sofia Bapna's research explores gender gaps, entrepreneurship in the digital economy, and AI in education. Her work draws on information systems, entrepreneurship, and labor markets, and relies on randomized field experiments and econometric methods focused on causal inference, complemented by surveys that dig into underlying mechanisms.

Bapna's research engages directly with industry, including partnerships with a national innovation-funding agency in Austria, an equity crowdfunding platform, a publicly traded staffing company in India, and an organization that hosts events for the data science and technology community. Her work has appeared in Management Science, MIS Quarterly, and Information Systems Research, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Kauffman Foundation. She's received the INFORMS Information Systems Society's Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award, the Gordon B. Davis Young Scholar Award, and the Association for Information Systems' Early Career Award.

Bapna serves on the Faculty Advisory Board for the Ciocca Center, supporting its mission to build an entrepreneurial mindset across the Santa Clara University community and beyond.

Mahmoud Parsian, Assistant Teaching Professor

Mahmoud Parsian brings more than four decades of experience spanning academia and industry to the Department of Information Systems and Analytics. His teaching and research interests include database management systems, data warehousing, business intelligence, big data analytics, machine learning, distributed computing, cloud data platforms, and artificial intelligence.

Before joining Santa Clara full-time, Parsian held senior technical leadership roles designing and developing large-scale analytics platforms, distributed data-processing systems, and cloud-based data solutions. He earned his PhD in computer science from Iowa State University. He's the author of several books, including Data Algorithms with Spark (O'Reilly Media, 2022), PySpark Algorithms, and Data Algorithms (O'Reilly Media, 2015). His teaching emphasizes hands-on work with real systems and real data, preparing students to become effective data professionals and technology leaders.

Management & Entrepreneurship

Holden Reyes, Assistant Teaching Professor

Holden Reyes has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in leadership, organizational behavior, management, communication, and human dynamics at several Bay Area universities, including Golden Gate University, Notre Dame de Namur University, and San Francisco Bay University, and previously served as an assistant instructor with UC Berkeley Extension. His teaching emphasizes active learning, reflection, and practical application.

Reyes holds a bachelor's degree in business administration, an MBA, and a Master of Legal Studies, and is currently completing his Doctorate of Education in Organization and Leadership at the University of San Francisco.

Brenda Myung, Assistant Professor

Brenda Myung joins the management and entrepreneurship faculty after earning her PhD in management from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and her B.S. from Cornell University.

Myung's research examines how organizations define and pursue organizational goals, particularly social goals such as diversity, equity, and inclusion, and how they borrow from and differentiate themselves from established approaches to financial goals in doing so. A second stream of her research looks at sources of performance differences beyond organizational capabilities, including status and privilege, in the context of corporate boards and the venture capital industry.

Outside of work, Myung stays active with running, yoga, and swimming, and says she's looking forward to learning to surf now that she lives closer to the ocean. She also enjoys cooking for family and friends.

Marketing

Yanqing Gui, Assistant Professor

Yanqing Gui joins the marketing faculty this fall. His research studies the marketing implications of narratives through the lens of consumer outcomes, sitting at the intersection of marketing, causal inference, and natural language processing. He looks at how narratives in news media and online platforms shape consumer perceptions and demand, developing methods to measure the economic impact of brand-related narratives, evaluate the role of emerging technologies in consumer activism, and address empirical challenges involving sparse, high-dimensional data.

Gui expects to receive his PhD in marketing from Cornell University this year. He also holds an M.S. in statistics from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in mathematics and statistics, with a minor in computer science, from the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor.