Please welcome these new tenure track faculty members joining Seidman in the Fall 2020 semester:

Assistant Professor of Economics
Erkmen Giray Aslim joins Seidman as ...[Read More]

Assistant Professor of Management
Jean C. Essila, PhD, DBA, is an...[Read More]

Assistant Professor of Marketing
Valerie Good earned her PhD in...[Read More]

Associate Professor of Management
Ben completed his Ph.D. in...[Read More]

Assistant Professor of Management
Chandresh holds a PhD in...[Read More]

Assistant Professor of Management
Brett is an organization theorist, who...[Read More]

Assistant Professor of Economics
Daniel joins the Seidman team...[Read More]

Assistant Professor of Accounting
Randi is a recent graduate from...[Read More]

Assistant Professor of Management
Dr. Fan earned his Ph.D. and MBA...[Read More]

Erkmen Giray Aslim

Assistant Professor of Economics

Erkmen Giray Aslim is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Seidman College of Business at Grand Valley State University. He has held a faculty position at Minerva Schools at KGI, Claremont Colleges and a postdoctoral research associate position at the Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M University. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Lehigh University in 2018.

Dr. Aslim’s primary substantive field of research is applied microeconomics, with a special focus on health economics, labor economics, and public economics. His current research mainly focuses on the impact of public health insurance on healthcare, labor market outcomes, and criminal behavior. His work on the effects of Medicaid expansions on criminal recidivism has received media attention in The Appeal and Sentencing Law & Policy.

Published August 2020
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Jean C. Essila

Assistant Professor of Management

Jean C. Essila, PhD, DBA, is an assistant professor of management in the Seidman College of Business at Grand Valley State University. His teaching areas are operations management, business analytics, business intelligence, business statistics, and management science.

Dr. Essila holds a PhD in Engineering Management from George Washington University, a DBA in Business Operations Management from California InterContinental University, and a Certificate in Business Analytics from Harvard University. He has also earned the SAP Certified Application Associate—Business Foundation & Integration with SAP ERP certification through GVSU SAP Academy.

Prior to joining GVSU, Dr. Essila taught at Northern Michigan University (NMU) from 2016-2020. While there, he won three academic awards, including the Outstanding Research Award, the Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award, and the Excellence in Scholarship Award, the latter being most prestigious university-wide research award granted by NMU in recognition of his “outstanding achievements in scholarship that have contributed to the discovery, dissemination and application of knowledge and enhanced the educational experience of Northern Michigan University students.”

Dr. Essila’s research interests include the impact of ERP systems on modern manufacturing operations’ effectiveness and efficiency, electronic supply chains’ operational effectiveness and influence on strategic organizational outcomes, and the results of active learning strategies on student performance. He has published many books, book chapters, and academic papers, and he has presented his work at international conferences.

Dr. Essila regards teaching as the driving passion that fuels his daily happiness. He takes pride in serving students and guiding them in achieving their goals. His teaching philosophy is that instructors should never give up on students who are working hard to achieve their dreams and aspirations; education is essential in the creation of their futures. He helps his students by bringing his real-world business experience into his classrooms, using a variety of methods to teach course material, and being available for consultation even after his students leave the classroom.

In addition, Dr. Essila has held top management positions in the oil and gas, carpet, transportation, and automotive industries, including at ExxonMobil, Perenco, International Business Corporation, PWV Inc., Johnson Controls North America, and Harvard Consulting. In 2004, he received the ExxonMobil Merit Award.

Dr. Essila’s hobbies and interests include practicing karate, jogging, playing soccer, reading, and going to the movie theater. His personal motto is “Life is fun and short, so enjoy as much of it as you can.”

Picture: At the beginning of his award acceptance speech: Dr. Essila holding his "Excellence in Research Award trophy at Northern Michigan University

Published August 2020
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Valerie Good

Assistant Professor of Marketing

Valerie Good earned her PhD in Marketing at the Broad College of Business, Michigan State University, in 2019, where she served as a fixed-term faculty member, teaching classes in consultative selling. Her research interests can be classified primarily as marketing strategy, specifically within the domain of personal selling and sales management, organizational front lines, and marketing strategy implementation.

Dr. Good is a published researcher with an active pipeline. Her dissertation was distinguished as the top in the field of sales, earning her the American Marketing Association Sales SIG Dissertation Award in 2020. She was also the recipient of the 2019 Taylor Research Award in recognition of research excellence. She also co-authored a paper that earned an award for organizational front lines research. Her research has been published in Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business Ethics and European Journal of Marketing with several additional papers currently under advanced review in top-tier marketing journals. Media mentions of her research include Forbes, Thrive Global, the Conversation, EconoTimes, the National Interest, The Hour, Broad College of Business News, and additional newspaper and radio outlets. She presently serves as Managing Editor for the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management.

Dr. Good also joins Grand Valley State University with a wealth of both industry and higher-level teaching experience. She launched a marketing consulting firm Good Impressions Marketing in 2006 to help small businesses and ministries with their writing, communications and strategic planning. Prior to this, Good was a manager for a high-demand advertising agency, a product manager for a financial services institution, a publicist for a marketing firm, and a sales & marketing coordinator in the hospitality industry. Moreover, Dr. Good has received multiple awards for teaching excellence and has coached sales students to individual and team success at the national level. Dr. Good previously served as an adjunct faculty member and an affiliated faculty member for two universities in Pennsylvania before earning her PhD. She instructed courses in marketing, advertising, personal selling, retail marketing, persuasion, managerial communications and e-marketing in both the traditional classroom and online. She consistently received student evaluations above the university and business college means as well as positive peer reviews. Her teaching philosophy is founded on the golden rule of "treating others the way you want to be treated," and she tries to make her classes engaging and interactive, teaching practical principles and application for professional and personal growth.

In her spare time, Dr. Good enjoys spending quality time with her family, playing musical instruments (the piano is her favorite!), running (having raced all distances up to and including full marathons), and reading.

Published August 2020
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Banjamin Walsh

Assistant Professor

Ben completed his Ph.D. in I/O psychology at UConn in 2011, after which he worked as Assistant and Associate Professor of Management at the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS). While at UIS, Ben taught face-to-face and online courses in OB and HRM, and in 2017 he was selected as the University Scholar for excellence in teaching and research.

Ben studies work stress and employee well-being, with a focus on understanding the antecedents and outcomes of workplace incivility and sexual harassment. His research is published in outlets such as Journal of Management, Journal of Business Ethics, and Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. Ben is an associate editor of Journal of Managerial Psychology and an editorial board member of Journal of Occupational Health Psychology and Stress & Health.

Outside of work, Ben spends his free time with his family where they can be found running, biking, and hanging out at West Michigan parks and beaches.   

Published August 2020
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Chandresh Baid

Assistant Professor

Chandresh Baid holds a PhD in Strategy and Entrepreneurship from Washington State University. His undergraduate training is in mechanical engineering and prior to pursuing a PhD, he worked in IT Consulting and the Software Product Development domain. His scholarship vision is to contribute to the field of strategic entrepreneurship through integration of insights from strategy, entrepreneurship, and innovation management literature.

Chandresh's current research falls under two broad streams: his primary stream is the domain of resource acquisition and resource orchestration by entrepreneurial firms, and the other stream explores research questions in the domain of entrepreneurial failures and subsequent outcomes. In class, he assumes the role of a facilitator as he believes that true learning happens when students are actively involved and engaged in the creation of knowledge. He subscribes to experiential learning and always looks for ways to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

In his free time, he likes to do small household DIY projects, and also enjoys spending time in nature, visiting state parks and other similar places.

Published August 2020
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Brett Crawford

Assistant Professor

Brett is an organization theorist, who examines institutions as they relate to the natural environment, organizational stigma, and policing work. He relies primarily on qualitative approaches, including multimodal long interviews and archival research. Brett has published in a variety of scholarly journals, including Organization Studies, Journal of Management Inquiry, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and Social Science & Medicine, among others. Brett is also a published poet, having his work featured in The American Fly Fisher. While Brett leverages his research to explore parts of the world that he wants to see, he adopts an experiential approach to the classroom, doing his best to bring the outside world into action-oriented learning opportunities.

Brett has held a variety of faculty and research appointments prior to returning to GVSU (he played baseball at GVSU as an undergraduate student), including Purdue University, the University of Pittsburgh, Northwestern University, and Stanford University. Brett completed his Ph.D. in Management and Organization Studies at Copenhagen Business School (Denmark) and his MBA at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Brett and his wife play zone defense with their three children and two Labrador Retrievers. In their free time, they farm in Southwest Michigan and look after a large chunk of land on the North Branch of the Au Sable River in the Lovells, Grayling area. Brett is most at home exploring a remote river with his fly rod.

Published August 2020
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Daniel Montanera

Assistant Professor of Economics

Daniel joins the Seidman team previously coming from Georgia State University, as well as the University of Western Ontario, where he earned his PhD.

His research focus is Health Economics, Public Economics, and Microeconomic Theory. He believes a good instructor keeps their students interested and engaged while pushing them to the limits of their abilities. He says, "If you can keep (most of) the students smiling, while also walking that fine line between tough and crazy, you're okay in my book!"

Outside of teaching, his interests include fishing, Canadian football (yes, that's a thing!), and karaoke. 

Published August 2020
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Randi Jiang

Assistant Professor of Accounting

Randi is a recent graduate from Louisiana Tech University.  Her research interests are in judgement and decision making in accounting, particularly as it relates to the detection of fraud and deception with the use of information systems and managerial ethics. Information security violations within an organization have lead the Security Exchange Commission to now have mandatory cybersecurity disclosures. Technologies thought to protect investors against frauds and help auditors identify those activities could actually assist executives in committing fraud. Randi believes that with increased usage of accounting information systems and the pressure and demands of accountants to maintain high quality decision process making, represents an important research avenue that requires further empirical study. Her research methodologies for investigating questions in this area consist of surveys and experimental instruments.  

Randi's teaching philosophy is to strive for the long-term success of her students through developing the student’s professional career. She aims to present the curriculum in a manner that is engaging, while simultaneously offering practical application of the subject matter. Outside of the classroom, her goal is to be an approachable resource for students to discuss concepts in more detail or interested in discussing career opportunities and decisions.

In her spare time, she enjoys cycling and hiking on land, any water sport, as well as yoga and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. She is an avid reader, coffee drinker, and enjoys the fine arts!

Published August 2020
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Raymond (Lei) Fan

Assistant Professor

Dr. Fan earned his Ph.D. and MBA from the Bauer College of Business, University of Houston. Prior to pursuing his Ph.D. degree, Dr. Fan worked for a Fortune 500 company for over 10 years. His current research focuses on healthcare operations management and healthcare analytics. In the classroom, Dr. Fan likes to share his industry experience with students and use projects to help students gain hands-on experience. He enjoys spending time outdoors with his family.

Published August 2020
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