SMU congratulates its new PhD graduates

Lee Yen Teik
PhD in Business (Finance)
Lee Kong Chian School of Business

Yen Teik, who graduated from the Lee Kong Chian School of Business (LKCSB), will be teaching at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in July 2013. He received his Masters of Science in Finance from LKCSB, and Bachelor of Accountancy from Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University.

Yen Teik’s research interests include political economy of finance, social networks, corporate governance, and credit rating agencies. Recently in May 2013, his co-authored paper, with Do Quoc Anh and Nguyen Bang Dang, entitled “Political Connections and Firm Value: Evidence from the Regression Discontinuity Design of Close Gubernatorial Elections” was awarded the Society for Financial Studies (SFS) Finance Cavalcade Award for the Best Paper in Corporate Finance.

Payas Gupta
PhD in Information Systems
School of Information Systems

Payas has joined New York University as a post-doctoral fellow. He has won a Best Paper Award at the 20th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2013. His research focuses on Information Security and Trust in general. His primary research interests revolve around human aspects of security, biometric security and security issues related to mobile devices. Payas is also involved in many research projects related to human subjects and novel user authentication.

At SMU, he has started doing research in cryptographic key generation using skin conductance to fight against coercion attacks. Payas is also exploring secure and usable mobile phone authentication techniques.

Recently, he was a visiting scholar in Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University.

Zhang Yonghui
PhD in Economics
School of Economics

Yonghui has secured a faculty position in the School of Economics at Renmin University in Beijing, China. Before enrolling in the PhD programme, he was a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University in China.

His research interests lie in econometric theory, non-parametric econometrics, large panel data models. Yonghui has published in The Econometrics Journal and co-authored a book chapter "Variable Selection in Nonparametric and Semiparametric Regression Models" (with Liangjun Su) in the Handbook of Applied Nonparametric and Semiparametric Econometrics and Statistics.