Our Students
The PhD Program in Business at the University of Alberta has a vibrant cohort of students across all disciplines. Designed to prepare students for a research-oriented career, the program provides opportunities for each student to work closely with faculty to develop her/his own research portfolio.
Students enrolled in 2026-2027
- Qi An
- Ming Gao
- Leixing Jiang
- Zhaoyang (Irene) Qin
- Alireza Tariverdi
- Kieran Taylor-Neu
- Qingning (Nancy) Wang
- Xin Yang
- Yulong Zhang
- He (Emma) Fang
- Mohammad Ghasemi Doudkanlou
- Guoxu Li
- Bowen Lin
- Kazi Mowla
- Golnoush Omidali
- Linfeng Tian
- Wenqi Wan
- Huijun (Janice) Yan
- Naga Sahita Akondi
- Timothy Derksen
- Nilay Deniz
- Seyyed (Ardalan) Eyni
- Bijit Ghosh
- Cindy Grappe
- Lance Gregory
- Arjang Nikbakht
- Erika Polishchuk
- Hyeonju Shin
- Roghayeh Teimourfamian Asl
- Jessica Therrien
- Yi Wei
- Mohammadreza (Roham) Bahri
- Nafiseh Esmaeeli
- Guifang (Flora) Feng
- Bo Han
- Chunzhen Huang
- Erfan Rafieikia
- Soroush Sadeghi
- Masoumeh Talebi
- Weilin Ye
- Maryam Zakeri Hosseinabadi
- Xinyin (Cindy) Zhang
- Haoran (Ryan) Zhu
- Ria Boodram
- Teddy Carter
- Maggie Cascadden
- Yau (Esther) Chau
- Chelsea Dufresne
- Sepideh Eivazi
- Omima El Kailani
- Mehri E. Baloochi
- Natalie Eng
- Julian Faid
- Mujtaba Haidari
- Samira Jafari
- Jennifer Kotadia
- Cecilia Mass
- Yufei Ren
- Jessica Roth
- Mahoor Sharifi
- Ali Sheibanishakib
- Conroy Smith
- Shuo Yuan
OUR GRADUATES
Our graduates have obtained positions in prestigious universities throughout the world, including California (Berkeley), Imperial College (London), Emory, Iowa, Pennsylvania (Wharton School), Hong Kong Institute of Science and Technology, McGill, and Western Ontario.
View a listing of our graduates, and their current institutions dating back to 1989.
Learn and network
Engage with our PhD students sharing their research through 15-minute presentations, posters and 3-minute presentations at the 2026 Business PhD Research Conference! This is a chance for business PhD students across five disciplines to share their research with students and faculty members in the school, and is open to any interested U of A community members.
Student publications
2025
Maggie Cascadden, PhD Candidate: Cascadden, M., Bastien, F. Block, E., & Jennings, P.D. Decolonizing Scaffolding: Learning from First Nations’ Resurgence to Recalibrate Entrepreneurship. Journal of Management Studies.
Natalie Eng, PhD Candidate: Eng, N., Block, E., Greenwood, R., & Lounsbury, M. (forthcoming). Legitimacy dynamics. In R. Younger & A. Zavyalova (Eds.), Oxford handbook of organizational social evaluations. Oxford University Press.
Natalie Eng, PhD Candidate: Eng, N., Fey, L., & Schupfer, H. (forthcoming). The practical significance of history: When and how history can be used for institutional change. In N. Eng, K. Heales, E. Block, & A. Slade Shantz (Eds.), Research on the sociology of organizations: Putting institutional theory to work during times of crisis (Vol. xx). Emerald Publishing.
Natalie Eng, PhD Candidate: Heales, K., Eng, N., Block, E., & Shantz, A. S. (forthcoming). Putting institutional theory to work during times of crisis (Introduction). In N. Eng, K. Heales, E. Block, & A. Slade Shantz (Eds.), Research on the sociology of organizations: Putting institutional theory to work during times of crisis (Vol. xx). Emerald Publishing.
Jennifer Sloan, PhD Candidate: Glaser, V., & Sloan, J. (forthcoming). “Deleuze and Guattari and Assemblage Theory”. In Elgar Encyclopedia of Strategy as Practice: Theorists. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Maggie Cascadden, PhD Candidate: Cascadden, M., Heales, K., Kingston, M., Heidak, P. & Jennings, P.D. (2024). Hybridizing sustainability metric applications with local stakeholder inputs: A life cycle assessment (LCA) with a co-design demonstration. Organization Studies, 0(ja).
Omima El Kailani, PhD Student: Jennings, J. E., & Elkailani, O. (2024). Women entrepreneurs in violent conflict zones. Open Access Government.
Cindy Grappe, PhD Student: Lombart, Cindy, Cindy G. Grappe, Didier Louis, Fabien Durif, Florence Charton-Vachet, and Olga Untilov. (2024, March 27). Produits « éthiques » : promettre ne suffit pas pour convaincre les consommateurs. The Conversation.
Lance Gregory, PhD Student: Lei, C., Zhang, P., Gregory, L., Wang, H., Wang, G., & Häubl, G. (2024). Preference for quicker offers: The critical roles of temporal reference points and evaluation mode. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 37(1), e2361.
Shuhan Yang, PhD Candidate: Tito L.H. Grillo, Shuhan Yang, Adrian F. Ward. Fairness revisionism: Reducing discrimination for the future reduces perceived unfairness in the past. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 115, November 2024, 104671.
Yasser Zeinali, PhD Candidate: Hashemian, F., Maleki, N., & Zeinali, Y. (2024). From User Behavior to Subscription Sales: An Insight Into E-Book Platform Leveraging Customer Segmentation and A/B Testing. Services Marketing Quarterly, 45(2), 153–181.
News for celebration
2025
Bijit Ghosh, PhD candidate in Marketing, along with supervisor John Pracejus, won an Honorable Mention Award at the Association for Consumer Research Conference in Washington, DC, October 2025, for their paper: Balancing Pain and Impact: How Additional Donation Options Influence Rounding-up Behavior.
Mehri Baloochi, PhD candidate in Strategy, Entrepreneurship & Management, has been awarded the 2025 Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship, a prestigious and highly competitive University-wide award.
Tim Derksen, PhD candidate in Marketing, is part of research group studying loneliness and consumer spending. See "Loneliness Can Sell Dog Food," in Chicago Booth Review, September 9, 2024.
Marketing PhD student Cindy Grappe has been awarded the 2024-25 Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship. This is the most prestigious graduate award administered by the University of Alberta: Cindy is one of only 18 students across campus to receive the award this year! It was Dorothy Killam's desire that those who receive awards in her husband’s memory should contribute to the advancement of learning and win distinction in their profession. Killam recipients are multi-faceted scholars whose intellect is complemented by a sound character. Congratulations, Cindy!
Congratulations to PhD Candidates, Arkadiy Lenchak (Finance) and Jennifer Sloan (SEM) who are the 2024 Graduate Student Teaching Award recipients, in recognition of their outstanding contributions to teaching.
Omima El Kailani, SEM 2nd year PhD student, has her paper "Coping with indeterminate dangers in a violent conflict zone: A study of Libyan women entrepreneurs" accepted for presentation at the Academy of Management conference this summer and has been invited for inclusion in the Best Paper Proceedings.
SEM 2nd year PhD student, Samira Jafari's paper "Does the masculinity and femininity of entrepreneurs influence the strategic aspects of their firms? Insight from a three-country study" was accepted to present at the Stockholm 2024 Diana International Conference on Women's Entrepreneurship Research.
The 2024 Recipient of the Eric Geddes PhD Scholarship in Healthcare Research is Arash Asgari, OIS PhD Candidate, for his project "Optimizing exam room assignments to physicians in the surgical clinic at Stollery Children's Hospital."