PhD | Job Market Candidates
Every year, the Merage School’s PhD Program produces an impressive list of students who are preparing to enter the job market.
Our graduates have gone on to become prominent scholars in a wide range of disciplines at many of the world’s most prestigious institutions.
Current Candidates
Email: jhenry3@uci.edu
Jazmin Henry is a doctoral student in Marketing at the UCI Paul Merage School of Business. Her main research interest is in consumer behavior, specifically race, class and culture in the marketplace. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Management from Fayetteville State University and a Master of Business degree from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Email: yliao18@uci.edu
Yifei (Leo) Liao is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in accounting at UC Irvine Paul Merage School of Business and is on the 2024-25 accounting job market.
Broadly speaking, his research explores the impact of accounting information, particularly from a financial accounting perspective. His dissertation, “Mandatory Pay Range Disclosures and Firm Information Environment,” investigates how the mandatory disclosure of pay range information influences corporate voluntary disclosures and information asymmetry. Given that the impact of information depends on the quality and feature of the content, he is also interested in using advanced techniques to characterize these aspects. In addition to his interest in utilizing advanced ML algorithms to refine accounting measurements, he is also fascinated by the impact of AI and technology on investors’ use of financial information. The impact of information depends on users’ capabilities. Therefore, he is also interested in how behavioral bias moderates the impact of information through information acquisition or integration process.
Email: xlin32@uci.edu
Xi (Henry) Lin is a doctoral candidate in Operations and Decision Technologies at UC Irvine Paul Merage School of Business. He is interested in devising and using tailored mathematical model to facilitate operational decision-making for newly emerged businesses in e-commerce and the retail industry. His current work focuses on various aspects of the emerging trend of livestream commerce, including negotiations between stakeholders, pricing and revenue sharing, consumer behavior, social implications, as well as inventory management and environmental impact.
Another application that he is working on is retail operations for food recovery such as pricing schemes of food waste supermarkets. He is also broadly interested in business model innovations for socially responsible operations.
He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Master of Science in Interdisciplinary Statistics and Operations Research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He is on the 2024-2025 job market.
Email: xiajingz@uci.edu
Xiajing Zhu is a PhD candidate in Marketing at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Business Administration with honors from Jiangnan University, China. Her research focuses on the impact of ideology, social media, sociopolitical factors, and branding strategies on consumer information processing and behaviors, including misinformation sharing, donations, and purchases. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Business Research and the International Journal of Advertising. Her latest paper on ideology and misinformation has been invited for minor revisions at the Journal of Marketing. Her dissertation uses two essays to explore how ideology and sociopolitical factors influence financial and other forms of support for ingroups.
As a first-generation college student, Xiajing is acutely aware of the barriers that underrepresented groups face when pursuing higher education. She has actively served as a representative of the DECADE program at Merage, which aims to promote inclusivity and foster a welcoming environment for PhD students from diverse backgrounds. She also initiated a weekly writing group starting during the COVID-19 pandemic to boost research productivity and help build community among her fellow PhD students at Merage.
