Meet the new Lazaridis Research Chairs

May 11, 2026

Over the past year, the Lazaridis School has appointed seven new research chairs to recognize and advance the impactful research within our faculty.

Dean Kyle Murray says, “These appointments recognize exceptional faculty members whose research excellence and scholarly leadership strengthen the School’s reputation and foster a vibrant culture of innovation.”

Get to know the new research chairs shaping impactful research at the Lazaridis School:

Nikolai Cook, Lazaridis Research Chair in Economic Science

Nikolai Cook is an associate professor of economics at the Lazaridis School. His microeconomics research applies to the field of environmental economics. Specifically, the effects of a changing climate and pollution levels on economic productivity and our available adaptations.

His focus is on the effects of the environment in the Canadian context.

Cook is also active in research transparency, which is the study of how academic research is conducted and the implications of researchers’ decisions.

This research led Cook to win the Government of Ontario’s 2024 Polanyi Prize. This annual award celebrates early-career scholars who are making significant contributions in the fields of chemistry, economic science, literature, physics and medicine.

Cook's research has been published in leading economics journals including the American Economic Review and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.

Tina Dacin, Lazaridis Research Chair in Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Tina Dacin is a professor of strategic management at the Lazaridis School. Her research in social innovation and social entrepreneurship explores how novel solutions to complex social problems are generated, organized, and sustained. She studies community entrepreneurship and inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems in extreme contexts such as Afghanistan and Indigenous-led enterprises in Canada, drawing attention to institutional innovation that occurs at the periphery of dominant systems.

Dacin’s current research focuses on the role of custodians in maintaining these practices, traditions and place in a variety of contexts including: AI, craft, future-making, fly fishing, remote communities and vinyl records.

Her work has been published in leading journals including Academy of Management Annals, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Business Venturing, Organization Studies, Organization Science and Strategic Management Journal.

Dacin's work has been recognized with awards including the Academy of Management Perspectives Decade Award, the Responsible Research in Management Award, and other awards and recognition for research including the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada and at Queen’s University and Texas A & M University. Since 2021, she has been included annually in Stanford’s list of the top two per cent most cited scholars worldwide.

Madhu Kalimipalli, Lazaridis Research Chair in Sustainable Finance

Madhu Kalimipalli is a professor of finance at the Lazaridis School, serving as Director of PhD and Research-Based Master’s Programs. His research spans fixed income, financial intermediation, corporate finance, and financial markets, with publications in top journals including the Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Corporate Finance Studies, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Journal of Financial Markets, Journal of Corporate Finance and Journal of Banking and Finance.

He has served on 20 PhD committees, supervised 32 graduate research projects, presented at over 220 venues worldwide, and received several best paper awards including the Lazaridis Research Excellence Award. He has co‑organized six major conferences and secured over $928,000 in research funding, primarily from competitive external sources.

His visiting roles span leading universities, central bank bodies, and industry organizations, including the Bloomberg R&D group in New York. He holds a PhD in Finance from Bauer School of Business, University of Houston and MA in Economics from Rutgers University.

Jie (Kassie) Li, Lazaridis Research Chair in Workplace Innovation

Jie (Kassie) Li is an assistant professor of OB/HRM since 2022, following the completion of her PhD at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Her research interests centre on the psychological underpinnings of workplace deviance and employee innovation. She explores the inherent paradox between these two phenomena—both of which involve violating norms and challenging the status quo—to provide organizations with research insights to curb harmful deviance without stifling innovative growth.

Li’s research is supported by competitive grants from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (RGC). Her work has been published in leading academic journals, including Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology and Journal of Organizational Behavior. She is also an active member of the international scholarly community, having organized and chaired six symposia at the Academy of Management (AOM).

Juan S. Morales, Lazaridis Research Chair in Political Economy of Media

Juan S. Morales is an associate professor of economics at the Lazaridis School. He is an applied microeconomist working in political economy and development economics.

His research examines how media environments and digital platforms affect public opinion, political behaviour, and policy outcomes. Some common themes include the use of theoretical spatial models of political behaviour, the use of social media data to study political environments, and the application of event-studies, difference-in-differences, and other applied micro empirical methods.

His work has been published in leading journals, including the Review of Economics and Statistics, The Economic Journal, The Journal of Public Economics and the Journal of Development Economics.

He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Toronto and a BCS in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.

Yujie (Jessie) Zhan, Lazaridis Research Chair in Employee Aging

Yujie (Jessie) Zhan is a professor and area coordinator for the Lazaridis School’s OB/HRM area. Her research interests include: work stress and well-being, emotion and emotion regulation at work, age in the workplace, retirement adjustment, work-nonwork interface and the intersections of these topics.

In her research, she examines the psychology of the retirement process. Her research aims to contribute to the understanding of older employees' retirement planning and decision-making, their adjustment to post-retirement life, and retirees' health and well-being.

She also studies work stress and well-being of employees, particularly those in service positions. Her research examines the triggers of service employees' work stress, such as mistreatment from customers and organizations' emotional demands, as well as service employees' affective, cognitive, and behavioral reactions to these stressors.

Zhan’s research has been published in academic journals including Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.

Xuan Zhao, Lazaridis Research Chair in Supply Chain Innovation

Xuan Zhao’s research involves utilizing the tools of management science, operations research, economics and data analytics to model, analyze, and derive insights into problems in supply chain management, operations management, marketing and entrepreneurship.

Her research papers appear in operations journals such as Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research, as well as marketing journals such as Quantitative Marketing and Economics and European Journal of Marketing.

Zhao’s research has been supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), SSHRC, provincial and international funding agencies, enabling her to supervise numerous postdoctoral fellows, doctoral and master’s students. She has won an Outstanding Researcher Award from Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (IEOM) Society, the Lazaridis Research Excellence Award, and multiple best paper and most-cited paper awards. She serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Operational Research Society and Supply Chain Analytics.

In one of her recent FT50 journal publications in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, her research offers valuable insights into two-sided platforms (retailers like eBay or services like Uber and Airbnb). The research finds platform competition enforces service standards and can substitute for external regulation, revealing that regulation is more effective at raising quality for monopolistic platforms than for competitive ones, with provider multi-homing further reinforcing this insight. These findings inform both platform managers and policy makers when regulation is most impactful and when market forces can sustain quality in two-sided markets.

As the Lazaridis School continues to engage in impactful research, the leadership of these world-class Lazaridis research chairs will grow the school’s quality and reputation for business and economics research in the years to come.