Faculty Highlights - June 2023

The faculty at the College of Business Administration are more than educators and teachers: They are scholars, researchers, and change-agents in and out of the classrooms. They extend their academic expertise beyond their respective disciplines and add their insights to the collective body of knowledge benefiting society at large. Below is a round-up of recent CBA faculty highlights.

Anthony Orlando was recently awarded a $149,625 research grant by California Air Resources Board (CARB) to study community understanding of toxic materials in the city of Paramount, CA. Under, “Community Engagement and Community Centric Research Roadmap: Focus on Metals-Related Toxic Emissions” project, Orlando will lead a team of community consultants and researchers to study who and how are the citizens of Paramount are informed or engaged in toxic emissions from metal processing.  It has become clear in recent years that the real estate field needs to work more closely with communities, particularly communities of color, throughout Southern California to address the negative consequences of environmental injustice. Paramount represents an ideal study-case; there are at least 16 metal processing companies in a city of 4.8 square miles with a population of 56,000 – primarily low-income and 80% Latinx.

This project will provide a roadmap for industry experts and regulators like CARB to better manage air quality and respond to the priorities of local residents. For this project, Orlando will be joined by two Co-PIs who represent the community of Paramount, and the team will oversee a team of consultants from the University of Southern California and the Center for Environmental Health. The research will be conducted over the next 15 months.

Orlando is an associate professor in the finance, real estate, & law (FRL) department. His teachings and research are focused on economics, finance, real estate, public policies, and racial inequalities. Moreover, Orlando's research and writing proposes new paths and solutions to today's equality gaps. His latest book, Keeping Races in Their Places, The Dividing Lines That Shaped the American City, explores the policies that have led to large homeownership and wealth gaps between Black and White Americans—and proposes solutions that could close these gaps.  Orlando is the Scholar of Analytics at CBA’s Singelyn Center for Innovative Analytics and recipient of the 2022 Cal Poly Pomona Outstanding Advisor Award.

Carrie (Shu) Shang has been named the 2023 Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Scholar-in-Residence at the Law Library of Congress. Collaborating with co-author Justin Evans (Georgia Southern University), JD, the two will conduct research over the summer at the Law Library of Congress in Washington, DC in “Compliance and Corporate Counsel in the Age of China’s Social Credit System,” project. Utilizing Library’s vast collections and content experts, the duo intends to combine a variety of Chinese- and English-language primary and secondary legal sources, as well as interview data with attorneys in China, to explore the implications of China’s social credit system for U.S. companies doing business there. They also hope to highlight and assess a number of regulatory implications such big data and AI-driven systems have for U.S. companies going abroad. Shang and Evans will present their findings to the Library once the project is completed.

Shang is an assistant professor in finance, real estate and law (FRL) department. She is a practicing attorney as a Special Counsel with LTL Attorneys (Los Angeles, San Francisco). She has published extensively on international law and international regulation topics. In private practice, Carrie has advised clients and been retained as an expert witness in various dispute resolution, technology transfer and compliance proceedings. She mentors students from diverse backgrounds, and has been awarded Cal Poly Pomona SPICE Award, Cal Poly Pomona Library Golden Leaf Honorary Mention (2021-22) and Faculty Mentor Star. She is also a founding member of California Arbitration (CalArb), board member of the Silicon Valley Arbitration and Mediation Center (SVAMC), and the private international law interest group co-chair of American Society of International Law (ASIL). Shang received her J.D. from University Southern California Gould School of Law and her B.A./B.S. in Molecular Cell Biology/Environmental Sciences from University of California, Berkeley.

Nastaran Simarasl was awarded the 2023 CBA Jagdish N. Sheth Award for Scholarly Excellence. Simarasl is an associate professor in management and human resources (MHR) department.  Her teachings are in strategic management and entrepreneurship disciplines. Simarasl’s research focus is entrepreneurial processes among unique and understudied groups, including women and immigrants in hard-to-access contexts (the Middle East, Africa, and India). Her research findings have appeared in top-rated journals such as the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Family Business Review, and European Management Journal. In spring 2023, she was invited as a visiting scholar to WHU, Otto Beisheim School of Management, in Vallendar, Germany, for research collaboration on female successors in German family firms. Simarasl serves on numerous CBA/CPP offices and committees and is the co-faculty advisor of Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization (CEO), a CBA student club that mentors and guides students to become successful entrepreneurs.  

The Jagdish N. Sheth Award for Scholarly Excellence is a CBA annual honor recognizing faculty scholarly and research achievements in the College. The award was established in 2019 and endowed by Nirmal Sethia (MHR professor emeritus) and Tara Sethia (professor of history and founder-director of the Ahimsa Center in College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences). The award is named after Jagdish N. Sheth, the Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Business in the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. Dr. Sheth is widely renowned for his contributions in consumer behavior, relationship marketing, competitive strategy, and geopolitical analysis. He is also the founder of the Sheth Foundation, whose mission is to develop and recognize scholars and scholarships in marketing globally and further the development of marketing thought.

CBA would like to recognize Ron Pike, an associate professor of Computer Information Systems in the College of Business Administration and faculty advisor for Students with an Interest in the Future of Technology, or SWIFT, for his dedication in shaping the future of cybersecurity professionals. SWIFT is a CPP student led organization whose mission is to provide the best place to empower students to become cybersecurity professionals. The students offer workshops, meetings, host conferences, and perhaps are best known for their competitive cybersecurity teams.

Under Pike’s tutelage, Cal Poly Pomona’s cybersecurity teams have won several national and global competitions over the years, with notable wins this past year that include:

• Hivestorm, a virtual collegiate-focused cyber defense competition that allows teams to compete together or separately from any location around the world: 23 CPP students teams entered the competition, and three scored in the top 10, including grabbing the number one spot
• Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC), the premier global cyber offense tournament: CBA student teams won back-to-back titles at the 2022 and 2023
• National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition: Secured second place, just behind Stanford University. The competition saw more than 1,500 competitors from 178 collegiate teams across the U.S. participate in the largest and most prestigious competition of its kind.

SANS Institute, the largest provider of cybersecurity training and certification to professionals at governments and commercial institutions, recognized Pike with their Sans Difference Maker Award in 2017. According to Sans, Pike was recognized “for his work, and showing real progress, in developing cybersecurity skills in college students by running competitive events that challenged students across a wide range of hands-on cyber security areas.”

Pike is currently a faculty member in CPP’s Cal Poly Pomona Cyber Collaborative and was previously the director of the Mitchell C. Hill Center for Digital Innovation, where he helped develop a student-run data center and a security operations center devoted to developing and operating a modern cloud-computing environment to serve education and research.

Pike was instrumental in securing the CPP’s designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity by the National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security and Central Security Service through 2027.