Soon after arriving on campus for her first semester as a Carroll School professor, Lai Wei stepped into what she termed the “Harry-Potter-style” Gasson Hall for one of the regular Civitas lunches that bring together faculty of different disciplines at Boston College. “At the end of the lunch, I actually started a research project with a faculty member outside my department, which becomes my first interdisciplinary, co-authored project,” said Wei, an assistant professor of operations management.

She and other new Carroll School faculty members have been learning as much as they’ll be teaching—about the culture of their new school and University. “I’ve been surprised at the level of engagement. Not just in the classroom, but also in the dining areas and on the quad, the level of activity is truly extraordinary,” said Do Yoon Kim (Information Systems).

“What I really like about the Carroll School, and BC in general, is that here they seem to find this balance of paying a lot of attention to and emphasizing both research and teaching,” said Larisa Kovalenko (Marketing), noting that other schools tend to focus primarily on one or the other. 

The 11 new faculty members hail from several corners of the globe, and bring with them a lively array of experiences and interests. One of them studies the fashion industry. Another managed a dance company, and now leverages that experience for insights into organizational behavior. Here’s a look at five of the new professors—scholars and teachers who model the life of the mind for their students. (See full list of new faculty in sidebar to the right.)

South Korea–born, Kim came to the U.S. as a high school student—and he has kept his global outlook. His forthcoming paper in the Strategic Management Journal, “The Ethnic Migrant Inventor Effect: Codification and Recombination of Knowledge Across Borders,” explores the “cross-border transformation of knowledge” and was co-authored by another researcher with international educational experience. 

This paper illustrates how Kovalenko positions her research at the intersection of marketing, finance, and law. The professor—who is from Russia and earned her M.B.A. in Turkey—explains that she focuses her research especially on the “financial consequences of branding decisions and marketing actions.” In addition, her teaching style “places a lot of emphasis on the real-life application of the concepts that I teach.”

Malenko serves on the editorial boards of some prominent academic publications, including the Journal of Finance. In his own research, Malenko says he studies “the role of information in the financing of firms, corporate governance, and organizational design, using the tools of microeconomics and game theory to provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of these issues.” Students in Malenko’s finance classes have plenty of opportunities to enter his world of research. Malenko says, “Especially in more advanced classes, I try to tie in the concepts I teach to existing evidence on these concepts from academic research, including from my papers.”

This evidence-based teaching style goes both ways. Just as students can draw lessons from Malenko’s research on financial concepts, he also looks to learn from his students. He says, “I like teaching cases because students’ questions and remarks often highlight interesting aspects of applied corporate finance problems that may deserve a more in-depth research analysis.”

You can see the creative influences of her past experience in her chosen areas of study, where she “examines how our psychological relationships with the ideas we generate, the people with whom we work, and the organizations of which we are a part influence how we collaborate.” Unlike some who rely exclusively on quantitative analysis for their research, Rouse prefers to use “qualitative methods—interviews and observations—in contexts where creative ideas are of primary importance—startups, video game design, modern dance, advertising, product design, and public relations.”

In the classroom, Rouse works “to establish an environment centered on respectful engagement and where moments of connection within the classroom can lead to experiences of meaning, engagement, and learning both for students and for me.”

In the classroom, Wei’s class Business Statistics combines her own research areas with a variety of statistical methods. She says the retailing industry has been “widely using and [is] still actively experimenting on various statistical methods, especially about learning customer preferences and purchase behavior.” Wei uses her experience with research to provide students with real-world examples, so they can see “connections between the techniques taught in class and the applications in practice.”

Outside of the classroom, Wei also is quick to acknowledge that her research is more than academic. It’s a little personal, too: One stream of that research relates to fashion and luxury—and, she reveals, “I am also a fan of fashion, beauty, and the luxury industry in general.”