Four faculty members will receive summer support to advance ongoing and new scholarship through the Research Excellence Fellowships. The recipients are Mi “Jamie” Zhou, Ph.D., associate professor of accounting; Xunyu Chen, Ph.D., assistant professor of information systems; and in management and entrepreneurship, Blakley Davis, Ph.D., associate professor, and Sven Kepes, Ph.D., professor.
“As a faculty member, I’m motivated to do research, of course,” Zhou said. “The fellowship means my work has been recognized by other faculty members and the school, and that provides more motivation to do even better work.”
Zhou said he’ll use the funding to continue his exploration into how corporations communicate data to investors on earnings calls. “They don’t manipulate the numbers,” Zhou said. “But they may manipulate the presentation, through charts and images, to make the numbers look better than they actually are.”
Chen said his research lies in the intersection between digital health care — online consultations and support groups — and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence. With the fellowship, he’s exploring the amount of digital health care content that’s generated by large language models such as ChatGPT and Gemini, and how people with mental health issues perceive and interact with after-visit summaries generated by AI, compared with human-generated summaries.
“This fellowship definitely gave me confidence to pursue grant applications” for his work, Chen said. “And if I can get positive results, then I feel I’m even better positioned for targeting bigger goals.”
Davis’s line of research is focused on early-stage financing for entrepreneurial ventures through crowdfunding. “I’ve been researching Kickstarter since my first year as a doc student — which is great, I got in on the ground floor,” he said. “My interests lately have been on personal disclosure: What am I, as an entrepreneur, willing to say or reveal about myself, and how, and what is the impact on potential backers?”
Davis said he considers the fellowship “validation of the quality of my research. Now that I have tenure, it’s important to me that I enjoy my work — not only for any acknowledgement but also because the process from journal submission to approval can take years. It can be so difficult to push that thing forward because you must rewrite it so many times and if it’s not an interesting topic to you, it can be exhausting.”
Kepes said he’ll use the funding to continue researching how employees react, individually and collectively, when companies implement AI tools in the workplace, and strategies companies can adopt to mitigate any negative consequences. A paper he co-authored on this topic for the Journal of Organizational Behavior was a Wiley top-cited article for 2025.
Kepes notes that faculty members who engage in research often continue working in the summer regardless of funding, and the fellowship “means the School of Business wants to ensure my work continues.”
The Research Excellence Fellowships previously were known as summer fellowships. This year, support increased to $17,000 per fellow. Fellows are required to present their work in the Dean’s Research Seminar series and serve on the fellowship selection committee the following year.