College of Business faculty receive grant as part of 2024 Faculty Research Committee Summer Fellowship Program

As previously announced by The University of Akron's Faculty Research Committee, 16 recipients across 13 proposals were chosen for the 2024 Faculty Research Committee Summer Fellowship Program. In total, 36 proposals were submitted, including nine joint proposals; the faculty selected will receive a maximum $10,000 grant to conduct research throughout the summer.

Among the summer 2024 recipients, Dr. Maria Hamdani, professor of management, and Dr. Joseph Fox, assistant professor of entrepreneurship, hail from the College of Business. Both will study aspects of artificial intelligence (AI).

Dr. Hamdani’s research explores the potential for AI-augmented analysis of structured employment interview responses. Her study will investigate how AI can enhance human resource (HR) professionals’ work, particularly in evaluating selection interview responses. While interview response evaluation can be a complex, time-consuming task, this study will address a critical gap in the practical application of structured interviews. This research uniquely promotes the use of evidence-based practices to reduce adverse impact, increases benefits for the organization and the employees, and simplifies operational complexity in conducting structured interviews.

Dr. Fox received a grant to study the lack of research in AI benchmarking tasks as they relate to entrepreneurship.

“This project will catalogue existing benchmarks at the intersection of entrepreneurship and AI while exploring the benchmark creation process to establish a set of learnings on the positive and negative aspects of such approaches in a field where innovation is a hallmark,” said Fox.

The College of Business would like to congratulate Dr. Hamdani and Dr. Fox, as well as all the recipients of this year's Faculty Research Committee Summer Fellowship Program:

• Dr. Diane Brown and Dr. Nicole Hunka - School of Nursing and School of Social Work and Family Sciences
• Dr. Linxiao Chen - Department of Chemical, Biomolecular and Corrosion Engineering
• Dr. Kristen Crish and Dr. Buket Barkana - School of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology and Department of Biomedical Engineering
• Dr. Shanon Donnelly - Department of Geosciences *
• Dr. Joseph Fox - Department of Management
• Dr. Maria Hamdani - Department of Management
• Dr. Michael Levin - Department of History
• Dr. Shu (Scott) Li - School of Communication
• Dr. Chelsea Miller and Dr. Richard Londraville - Department of Biology
• Dr. Kevin Moseby - Department of Sociology
• Dr. Hossein Ravanbakhsh - Department of Biomedical Engineering
• Dr. Kwek-Tze Tan - Department of Mechanical Engineering
• Dr. Martin Wainwright - Department of History