Faculty appointments
Oxford Saïd attracts the top talent in business academia. We celebrate the appointments made during the 2019/20 academic year
Pinar Ozcan
Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation
An award-winning specialist in strategy and entrepreneurship in technology markets, Pinar Ozcan joined Oxford Saïd after a Professorship at Warwick Business School and time as Visiting Scholar at Sydney Business School. Her current research project on open banking examines the industry disruption through the regulation and entry of fintech companies, and the development of the sharing economy.
Ozcan’s recent accolades for her research include a place on the global Thinkers 50 list of emerging thought leaders and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for her work on disruption in banking. In 2017 she was chosen as one of the Best 40 Business School Professors under 40 by Poets & Quants. She has extensive experience working with industry and has consulted for many large companies including Citibank, Coca-Cola and KPMG.
Anette Mikes
Associate Professor of Accounting
A pioneer in the field of risk management, Anette Mikes joined the accounting faculty at Oxford Saïd from HEC Lausanne, where she spent five years working as a Professor. Formerly of Harvard Business School, where she co-launched their executive education programme Risk Management for Corporate Leaders, her research explores the relationship between risk management, innovation and dissonance. Her latest work, on the interplay between risk management, strategy and business ethics, is considered ground-breaking in a crowded field. She has twice won the David Solomons prize for the Best Article in Management Accounting Research, and her research documentary The Kursk Submarine Rescue Mission won the Most Outstanding Short Film Award at the 2014 Global Disaster Risk Forum in Davos.
Jiri Knesl
Associate Professor of Finance
Empirical and theoretical asset pricing forms the mainstay of Jiri Knesl’s research in the field of finance. He has a particular interest in the overlapping relationships between technology, capital and different types of labour, and how this can affect a firm’s approach to risk, and the way that this manifests itself in the financial markets.
Knesl completed his PhD in Finance at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business in Vancouver, Canada before joining Oxford Saïd earlier this year. He also has two master’s degrees from the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Last year, his paper on Automation and the Displacement of Labor by Capital won the Best Paper prize at the 2019 Belgrade Young Economists Conference.
Marya Besharov
Professor in Organisations and Impact
Marya Besharov is an organisational theorist with a background in sociology who joined Oxford Saïd in January after more than a decade at the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University, New York State, where she was Associate Professor. Her research examines how organisations, and their leaders, navigate the competing strategic priorities in order to achieve social impact and commercial success. She has a particular interest in hybrid organisations, such as social enterprises and mission-driven businesses, making these her main area of focus.
She holds an MA in Sociology and a PhD in Organisational Behaviour from the University of Harvard, as well as an MBA from the University of Stanford.
Eero Vaara
Professor in Organisations and Impact
A world-leading expert in discursive and narrative perspectives, Eero Vaara researches organisational and strategic change. He arrived at Saïd Business School in January from Aalto University School of Business, where he served as Professor of Organization and Management. His work deals with strategy process and practice research, studies of radical change, such as mergers and acquisitions, work on institutional change and legitimation, and research into multinational corporations, nationalism and globalisation. He combines the relevant practical topics, such as strategy work and the management of post-merger integration, with deep theoretical and methodological reflection on organisational and strategic processes and practices.
Jason Bell
Associate Professor of Marketing
Jason Bell joined in January 2020 and studies the marketing of new products at the Future of Marketing Initiative, Oxford Saïd’s collaboration with Facebook, Google, Twitter and others, where he was previously a Career Development Fellow. He researches new product development, especially durable goods, and focuses on the use of machine learning for screening product ideas and predicting success. Earlier in his career he worked on digital marketing and advertising research, such as studying the effectiveness of mobile advertising over time and understanding the dynamics of social media influencers, using a combination of machine learning tools, qualitative interviews and focus groups. Bell has an interest in natural language processing with applications in computational creativity, automated idea evaluation and market opportunity discovery. He has a master’s in Economics and a PhD in Marketing from the University of Iowa.
