Seven faculty selected as Ethics & Professional Responsibility Scholars

Seven faculty from top universities across the nation have been selected as 2024 Ethics & Professional Responsibility Scholars by the Center for Professional Responsibility in Business and Society at Gies College of Business.

Faculty scholars are one way the Center expands the community of scholars participating in the conversation about professional responsibility and ethical issues. Scholars assist with current Center endeavors, build partnerships across campus, and share their expertise and wisdom to benefit the Center and our community. 

The Center strives to inspire research, education, and discussion about professional responsibility at both the individual and organizational level. The research and application falls under three pillars: trust, sustainability, and wellbeing. Together these pillars help to facilitate Center’s research and education efforts on ethics, accountability, and professional responsibility.  

The following faculty were selected as Ethics & Professional Responsibility Scholars:

Aravinda Garimella, associate professor of business administration at Gies College of Business, will advance multiple ongoing research projects in AI ethics. She will develop teaching material on “Responsible Artificial Intelligence,” which will cover key concepts about the governance framework of how an organization approaches the ethical challenges around artificial intelligence. This could be developed into a bite-sized learning unit for upskilling or be made available to analytics instructors who wish to introduce an ethics element into their courses. She will also develop a case study at the intersection of AI and ethics that will present a real-world scenario that will push students to think critically about the ethical dilemmas around the design and deployment of algorithms and apply the concepts from the teaching material.

Yunchuan (Frank) Liu, associate professor of business administration at Gies College of Business, will embark on an ambitious project examining the bias and fairness issues of AI-powered recommendation systems used by online platforms. The project aims to uncover the mechanisms through which AI systems may perpetuate bias and to develop strategies for mitigating these issues, fostering more equitable digital platforms. This work will critically examine how platforms like Amazon.com, LinkedIn, and others navigate the balance between algorithmic efficiency and ethical responsibility, offering insights into the conditions under which fairness can be integrated into AI systems without compromising their operational effectiveness.

Jeffrey Loewenstein, professor of business administration at Gies College of Business, is examining people’s evaluations of others’ solutions. New solutions might be seen as creative and can also be seen as cheating. Recognizing innovative new ideas is hard and identifying legitimate ethical concerns is important. These two concerns intersect in the evaluation process. This project aims to examine why even the same ideas might lead to interpretations of unethicality or creativity, depending on the situation and evaluator.

Wei Zhu, associate professor of accountancy at Gies College of Business, is examining the impact of financial reporting pressure faced by managers to meet earnings benchmarks (MEB) on biodiversity loss. Zhu plans to provide the first piece of large-scale empirical evidence on the adverse effects of corporate behavior on biodiversity, which, in turn, can help set priorities when allocating scarce conservation resources. His project has the potential to show that corporate activities generate externalities not only for human stakeholders—such as shareholders, employees, and neighboring communities—but also for nonhuman species inhabiting the same environment.

Kimberly Rios, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is developing a large, publicly accessible dataset that focuses on Americans’ trust and well-being in the workplace. She will solicit suggestions and submissions that effectively broaden the conversation from colleagues at Gies College of Business and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Doing so would facilitate collaborations across the university, as well as increase the scope of the survey to maximize the chances that researchers from different institutions would find the dataset useful. Through the survey, she will examine the factors that contribute to different groups’ feelings of engagement and inclusion within their organization. One such factor is perceptions of whether the organization recognizes and celebrates differences between groups or minimizes differences in favor of similarities and treating people as individuals. 

Ethan Kross, professor of management and organizations and professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, will assist with Center research and the Annual Wellbeing Survey. He will help to craft reports and collaborate on scientific papers and serve as an ambassador for the Center.

Corey Keyes, professor of sociology at Emory University, will assist with Center research and the Annual Wellbeing Survey. He will help to craft reports and collaborate on scientific papers and serve as an ambassador for the Center.