Public Policy and LMC-Digital Media PHD Graduates Attain Tenure-Track Positions

Posted July 20, 2020

Mallory Flowers, Evan Mistur, and Elie Sung, graduates of the School of Public Policy doctoral program, and Firaz Peer of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication Graduate Program in Digital Media have each attained tenure-track positions at universities.

Mallory Flowers is now an assistant professor of management in the College of Business at the University of Rhode Island (URI). Her teaching focuses in the strategy area. Her research explores private governance at the intersection of business, policy, and technology.

Her doctoral dissertation, “Green Certification Pathways: The Roles of Public Goods, Private Goods, and Certification Schemes,” was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, and was awarded Best Dissertation in 2017 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Flower’s research has been mobilized for practice in the nonprofit sector, where she has served at board request in consulting and scientific advisory roles focused on climate change and issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Prior to joining URI, Mallory held a postdoctoral research faculty position in the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University in the Netherlands.

Evan Mistur is assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration and Public Policy in the College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Arlington. His current research is on environmental conservation policy, focusing on normative sustainability, stakeholder involvement, and democratic collaboration.

Mistur’s dissertation, “For the Birds: Researching Theory and Practice in Environmental Conservation Policy Processes,” was completed in June, 2020. While at Tech he won several awards for his outstanding performance in research.

Prior to graduate school, Mistur studied ethics, existentialism, and literature, graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2013 with a dual B.S. in Philosophy and Communications. He also worked abroad as an English Teacher in Huzhou, China.

Elie J. Sung is assistant professor at the École des hautes études commerciales de Paris (H.E.C. Paris). Her research focuses on firm innovation strategy, and the integration between public policy and firm strategy. She has examined how firms and the courts jointly shape patent policy and how in turn those policies shape firms’ innovative activities.

Completed in August, 2019, Sung’s dissertation “The Co-Construction of Court-Made Patent Policy and Firm Strategy,” was supported by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant in the Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) program. She was a finalist for the Kauffman Prize for Best Student Paper at the REER conference and received the Best Paper for an Emerging Scholar Award at the European Policy for Intellectual Property conference.

Sung's work was recognized by several awards and fellowships. As a reviewer, she has been recognized with multiple awards from the Academy of Management Conference and the journal Research Policy.

Prior to her PhD, she worked in management consulting on projects with telecom and media operating companies, and national regulatory authorities. Other professional experiences include working at the French Telecommunications and Posts regulatory authority (ARCEP, French equivalent of the FCC) and at a major investment banking company. She completed an undergraduate degree in Mathematics, and graduate degrees in I.T. engineering and in applied economics.

Firaz Peer is assistant professor in the School of Information Science in the College of Communication and Information at the University of Kentucky, Lexington.

For his dissertation, Firaz studied the sociotechnical infrastructures that were involved in building, using and maintaining a community indicator data dashboard that was designed for a group of resource constrained neighborhoods in Atlanta. He graduated in 2020 with a Ph.D. in Digital Media. While at Georgia Tech, his research focused on examining the ways in which data-centric and algorithmic systems construct and are in turn constructed by the communities they are designed to serve. Informed by scholarship from Human Computer Interaction and Science and Technology Studies, he uses participatory design research methods to study how specific communities design, use and maintain data centric and algorithmic systems. He hopes to continue such participatory design research by working closely with local communities in his new position.

He is active in scholarly communities such as ACM’s Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Social Media (CSCW), ACM’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), ACM’s Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), iConference, Participatory Design Conference (PDC), and Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S).

Read about other recent Ivan Allen doctoral students in tenure track positions