Washington and Lee University
Raquel Meyer Alexander is a new Associate Professor of Accounting in the Williams School of Commerce, Economics and Politics at Washington & Lee University. Prior to arriving at W&L, Raquel taught for seven years at the University of Kansas, where she won numerous teaching awards. Alexander earned her Ph.D. in 2001 at the University of Texas-Austin. Prior to that, she worked as a tax consultant in the Dallas, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona offices of KPMG. She is already a familiar face to some on campus, as she taught a spring term seminar entitled the Business of Contemporary Art.
Among Professor Alexander's more notable achievements is her service learning work with students to provide financial and tax advice to non-traditional audiences. She led an effort to develop a web site providing advice on tax relief for victims of Hurricane Katrina. She developed similar advice to aid victims of a Kansas tornado. Under her supervision, Prof. Alexander's students developed the high school financial literacy curriculum for the state of Kansas. Her various service learning initiatives have earned recognition from the U.S. Congress, Campus Compact, the IRS, and the American Bar Association.
Prof. Alexander has published more than two dozen articles in various academic and practitioner outlets. Her award-winning research focuses on tax policy related to personal savings and corporate taxation. Her work has led to reform in the college savings industry and has been requested by policy makers and regulators such as the SEC, the MSRB, FINRA, and the White House. Alexander's research has been published in top journals such as the Journal of the American Taxation Association, Behavioral Research in Accounting, and the Journal of Law and Politics. She has presented at over 50 academic institutions and conferences and she has been quoted or cited in numerous popular press publications including Business Week, International Herald Tribune, Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal among others. Alexander currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Taxation Association.
Raquel and her husband, Glenn, have three children and spend their spare time coaching youth sports and volunteering at local schools.
Professor Ge Bai has joined the Williams School faculty after completing her PhD in Accounting from Michigan State University. She has taught management accounting and cost accounting at Michigan State University and received the 2011 Student Excellence in Teaching Award from the Department of Accounting & Information Systems. She will have primary responsibility for similar courses here at W&L. Professor Bai is a Certified Public Accountant. She has worked as a business process re-engineering supervisor at Musashi North America Inc., overseeing the redesign of the company's internal control system.
Professor Bai's research has been focused on understanding how accounting information assists managerial decisions and whether governance mechanisms make a difference in various organizational outcomes. Her research articles have been published in the Journal of Management Accounting Research. Her dissertation, which examines the role of Certified Public Accountants as board directors in nonprofit organizations, received the 2011 American Accounting Association/Grant Thornton Doctoral Dissertation Award for Innovation in Accounting Education.
Professor Bai lives with her husband, Dr. Jianbo Liu, and their son, Winfred, in Lexington.
Professor Shikha Basnet has joined the Williams School as Assistant Professor of Economics. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. She will be teaching both introductory and advanced courses in economics, as well as courses in applied statistics.
Before coming to W&L Professor Basnet worked at a Colorado-based NGO where she helped develop technical models to analyze the economic cost of maritime piracy around the Horn of Africa in the Indian Ocean. The report she co-authored serves as the official cost estimate of Somali piracy by the shipping industry and was widely reported in popular media. Professor Basnet also has experience teaching at the primary level in Kathmandu, Nepal, where she was born and raised. Her ongoing research is in the areas of political economy and developmental economics.
Professor Denis Kennedy joins the Williams School's Politics Department having recently completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Minnesota. He will be teaching courses on global politics and international relations while at W&L.
Professor Kennedy's research interests range broadly in the areas of international organization, global governance, and International Relations theory, with a specific focus on humanitarianism. His dissertation examines the development of humanitarianism into a professional, rule-governed field of endeavor through an analysis of the most significant international self-regulatory initiatives. He has published work in the Journal of Global Change and Governance and Journal of Humanitarian Assistance and has made more than a dozen presentations of his research to a variety of national and international audiences. Further, he is actively involved in the evaluation of policies related to humanitarian responses of both Finland and Norway.